AT&T and FBI Investigate iPad 3G Security Breach

Ryan Tate from Gawker mentioned how the list of users who have been compromised includes thousands of prominent people in the politics, media, and finance space. Goatse Security, a France-based hacking group discovered this security loophole. The hackers were apparently able to get access to the email addresses of iPad 3G users using a simple script on the AT&T's website that returned the emaila ddress of users when supplied with the owners' ICC-ID. ICC-ID is a unique identification number that is displayed mainly on SIM cards that associate every mbile phone device to a particular number. A large portion of the database is known to have been obtained by guessing the ICC-ID of potential iPad 3G users.

AT&T has acknowledged the security breach and apologized for the incident. The carrier has also confirmed that the loophole has been fixed now. Here is what they had to say:

"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...We are continuing to investigate and will inform all customers whose e-mail addresses and ICC IDS may have been obtained. At this point, there is no evidence that any other customer information was shared.

The person or group who discovered this gap did not contact AT&T.

We are continuing to investigate and will inform all customers whose e-mail addresses and ICC IDS may have been obtained.

We take customer privacy very seriously and while we have fixed this problem, we apologize to our customers who were impacted."

FoxNews also reported earlier that the FBI was stepping in to investigate what they referred to as the "potential cyber threat". It will be interesting to see how Apple responds to the latest breach. They have yet to issue an official statement in this regard. Stay tuned for more information by following us on Twitter and/or subscribing to our RSS feeds.