AT&T Inc. apologized to Apple iPad 3G tablet users whose e-mail addresses were exposed during a security breach disclosed last week.
“No other information was exposed,” Dorothy Attwood, AT&T’s chief privacy officer, said in an e-mail sent Sunday to iPad accounts that may have been affected. “We apologize for the incident and any inconvenience it may have caused.”
As many as 114,000 e-mail addresses were uncovered through a program on AT&T’s website by Goatse Security, said Escher Auernheimer, an analyst with the nine-person group, after the leak was made public last week.
The Federal Bureau of Investigation has begun an inquiry, bureau spokeswoman Lindsay Godwin said Friday, declining to give more specifics.
Goatse said it obtained access to the e-mail addresses of New York Times chief executive officer Janet Robinson and New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg, among others.
“The hackers deliberately went to great efforts with a random program to extract” the information, Attwood said in the e-mail. “They then put together a list of these e-mails and distributed it for their own publicity.”
Goatse, which helps Web firms close security gaps, said in a blog posting Monday that it uncovered the iPad flaw in about an hour and publicized it in the interest of user safety.
“The potential for this sort of attack and the number of iPad users on the list we saw who were stewards of major public and commercial infrastructure necessitated our public disclosure,” Auernheimer said on the blog.
