iPad Security Breach Exposes 114,000 E-mail Addresses

A security breach on AT&T's web site allowed a group of hackers to snarf up 114,000 e-mail addresses from unsuspecting iPad users, according to The New York Times. AT&T said that it has already closed the whole, but the question remains of why they stored such information on a publicly accessible web site in the first place.

While stolen e-mail addresses by themselves aren't of much use, other than to add to spam mailing lists, the hacking group, Goatse, was also able to get the ICC-ID of iPads. The ICC-ID is a unique identification number for the iPad. AT&T denied the ICC-ID could be used for anything other than getting an e-mail address, but some security experts cautioned it could still possibly lead to find the device's location.

Technical details of the breach were reported by Gawker, which said it involved spoofing the User-agent in the header to make AT&T's servers respond to a request from a PHP script for harvesting the data.