June 10 (Bloomberg) -- A security breach in  AT&T Inc.’s wireless network exposed the e-mail addresses of some  owners of Apple Inc.’s iPad 3G.
     AT&T, the second-largest U.S. mobile phone  provider, corrected the flaw, the company said yesterday in an e-mailed  statement. The New York Times Co. told its staff to shut off iPad  wireless access after learning of a breach involving AT&T, according  to a memo confirmed yesterday by the New York Times.
     A group called Goatse Security said it found a  breach that let it uncover information based on a unique code on iPad  SIM cards. It then released addresses of iPad owners, including New York  Times Co. Chief Executive Officer Janet Robinson and New York Mayor  Michael Bloomberg, to Gawker Media’s Valleywag.
     “This issue was escalated to the highest levels  of the company and was corrected by Tuesday, and we have essentially  turned off the feature that provided the e-mail addresses,” Dallas-based  AT&T said in the statement. AT&T declined to comment further,  spokesman Fletcher Cook said in an e-mail.
     The vulnerability adds to Apple’s chagrin two  months after an unreleased prototype of the iPhone, lost by an Apple  engineer, was disassembled and photographed by Gawker’s technology blog  Gizmodo.com.
     “This breach is obviously embarrassing for  AT&T and for Apple, but knowing the names of the people who bought  the first iPads is more intriguing than dangerous,” Joris Evers, a  spokesman for security-software maker McAfee Inc., said in an interview  from Santa Clara, California.
                        2 Million IPads
     Apple has sold more than 2 million iPads since  releasing the device in April. Some models of the iPad tablet work with  AT&T’s third-generation wireless network, and other versions only  work on Wi-Fi networks. Apple doesn’t say how many of each model it has  sold.
     AT&T said it continues to investigate and  found no evidence that any other customer data was revealed.
     AT&T rose 43 cents, or 1.7 percent, to $25.33  at 9:35 a.m. in New York Stock Exchange composite trading. The stock  had declined 11 percent this year before today.
     Apple representatives Steve Dowling and Natalie  Kerris didn’t respond to requests for comment.
--With assistance from Connie Guglielmo and Rochelle Garner in San  Francisco. Editors: Tom Giles, Stephen West.To contact the reporters on this story: Greg Bensinger in New York at gbensinger1@bloomberg.net; Peter Burrows in San Francisco at pburrows@bloomberg.net.
To contact the editor responsible for this story: Tom Giles at tgiles5@bloomberg.net.
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