U.S. prosecutors have charged two people with stealing email addresses and other data of about 120,000 users of Apple’s iPad after finding a security weakness in AT&T Inc servers, reports Reuters. Prosecutors said a “brute force” attack over several days last June affected iPad users who accessed the Internet through AT&T’s 3G network.
Among the possible victims were celebrities, businesses executives and government officials like New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg, ABC News anchor Diane Sawyer, movie mogul Harvey Weinstein and perhaps then-White House Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel, prosecutors said.
Daniel Spitler and Andrew Auernheimer have each been charged with one count of fraud and one count of conspiracy to access a computer without authorization. Auernheimer made headlines last June, reports Computer World, when he discovered that AT&T’s website was disclosing the e-mail addresses and the unique ICC-ID numbers of multiple iPad owners. Claiming that he wanted to help AT&T improve its security, he wrote a computer script to extract the data from AT&T and then went public with the information.
In other security news, Facebook announced last week that it would begin allowing third-party applications and websites to request that users share both their mobile phone number and address. Now, the company has said that it will be putting the new feature on hold while it makes changes to make sure that Facebook users are aware of the potential for data sharing.
