Last week, the mobile broadband world wept in terror as a group of script kiddies harmlessly ventured through a security vulnerability on AT&T’s network and managed to publish the names of over 114,000 Apple iPad-owning CEOs, military officials and top politicians across the United States.

The self-described hackers wrote the script to randomly generate numbers that mimicked the ICC-ID (Integrated Circuit Card Identifier) numbers on the AT&T SIM cards of these iPad 3G owners. After obtaining the numbers, they decided to aggregate a list of collected emails and send it off to Gawker Media, which publicized it on Wednesday. A recent follow up on the issue suggests that the FBI “is aware of these possible compuer intrusions” and is currently investigating the security breach.

Today, reports have been coming in from AT&T customers that the company has been sending out apology emails to affected Apple iPad 3G customers on its network.  The email, signed by AT&T Chief Privacy Officer Dorothy Atwood, explained that a number of iPad 3G owners’ email addresses were made public through a security breach in AT&T’s website. Atwood went on to explain that “unauthorized computer hackers” maliciously exploited a function designed to speed up the iPad network login process by pre-populating an AT&T authentication page with the email address used to register the iPad 3G for data service.

Goatse Security, the group responsible for publicizing the exploit and sending Gawker Media the email addresses, quickly defended its actions by stating that “all data was gathered from a public webserver with no password, accessible by anyone on the Internet.” The group also insisted that it had not given details of the attack or any user data to anyone until it had verified the hole was closed on AT&T’s webpage on Tuesday.




Image taken from BoyGeniusReport