FBI Investigating iPad E-Mail Breach
CC-licensed, thanks to mcmorgan08 on Flickr.
Wednesday, carrier AT&T acknowledged the email addresses of iPad owners were compromised after a security group announced they had discovered a flaw in AT&T security allowing email identities to be gathered.
The group, Goatse Security, found that AT&T’s website asked for the iPad’s unique ID number, displaying the associated e-mail address. The group then created a program that sent random ID numbers and collecting the corporate, military and political e-mail identities stored by AT&T.
Although Apple had no comment on the security breach, AT&T has been “in close contact” with the Cupertino, Calif. iPad maker, according to the Wall Street Journal. AT&T security chief Ed Amoroso told the newspaper storing iPad owner e-mail addresses during registration was probably a mistake.
This is just the latest chapter in a rocky relationship between AT&T and Apple customers. The carrier has been criticized for service problems. AT&T is currently the exclusive carrier for the iPad, as well as the iPhone.
Ed Sutherland is a veteran technology journalist who first heard of Apple when they grew on trees, Yahoo was run out of a Stanford dorm and Google was an unknown upstart. Since then, Sutherland has covered the whole technology landscape, concentrating on tracking the trends and figuring out the finances of large (and small) technology companies.
