AT&T has confirmed a security breach that led to the theft of SIM ICC-IDs and e-mail addresses of more than 100,000 new Apple iPad owners.
The "security" group responsible was able to steal the list using a script on the AT&T website. The SIM ICC-ID is the iPad identification number required to authenticate the device on the AT&T 3G data network.
A business customer informed AT&T of the vulnerability on Monday, but the issue wasn't resolved until Tuesday. By that time, over 100,000 iPad owners had their email information stolen. The stolen list reportedly contains email addresses of celebrities, politicians and chief executives.
Security experts said iPad owners who had their ICC-ID information stolen do not face any immediate security threats. In fact, experts said they don't know of any current vulnerabilities that threaten iPad owners, so this is a bigger problem for AT&T than for Apple. Apple has continued its partnership with AT&T since the iPad's release in April, and this looks extremely bad on AT&T's part.
"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," said AT&T spokesperson Mark Siegel in an e-mail statement.
AT&T said the problem has already been fixed, and is now informing affected customers. Apple didn't confirm the number of affected users, but a report posted on Wednesday said Gawker communicated with the group involved and has positively confirmed some of the victims.
Another wildcard in this story is that the script used by the security group was provided to others, before AT&T fixed the issue. Due to this, it's possible that many more email addresses could've been extracted, from unknown sources. This also puts all affected iPad owners at risk of being bombarded by massive amounts of spam or possibly malicious email messages.
The iPad has sold more than 2 million units since April, with large sales numbers expected by the end of 2010. This is the most important time for Apple to sell its tablets, as Hewlett-Packard, Dell, and other companies are still scrambling to launch their own rival products.
