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Feds charge two in June 2010 iPad 3G hacking

by Mike Schramm Jan 18th 2011 at 6:30PM

Two men have been charged with stealing the email addresses and personal data of over 120,000 iPad users last year. A 26-year-old from San Francisco and a 25-year-old from Fayetteville, Arkansas were charged with hacking into AT&T's servers and stealing the data, scraped from AT&T's website.

Both were charged with one count of identity fraud and one count of conspiracy to access a computer without authorization. They were caught in part due to IRC chat logs in which the hackers bragged about the theft and talked about trying to spin it as a statement against AT&T's lax security. Prosecutors are scheduled to give a press conference about the case today, so the trial should be underway before long.

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Two men have been charged with stealing the email addresses and personal data of over 120,000 iPad users last year. A 26-year-old from San...
 

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gnicholls

They did not hack any iPads, they hacked AT&T's crappy website. Just because they sold 17 million iPads last quarter doesn't mean you should throw the name in every headline you can.

January 19 2011 at 12:41 PM Report abuse rate up rate down Reply
Risto T

um.. i'm sorry but this is not hacking or criminal in any way..

If you are cracking passwords or encryption to gain access to a private network that's one thing, but the Internet is a public network.

AT&T made the data available. They put their customer's data on a public network, at a URL that was easily guessed.

This is how the internet is designed to work.
You make a request and the web server returns data.

If I enter http://www.tuaw.com/2011/01/17 into a http client to try to get yesterdays stories, am I hacking? of course not.

I hope their lawyer can make the judge understand that this is no more criminal than watching youtube by guessing video IDs

January 18 2011 at 7:23 PM Report abuse rate up rate down Reply
1 reply to Risto T's comment
Dan Woods

If your description is correct, these kids should get a slap on the wrist and AT&T should go "a row of s***houses" as we say here in Australia.

If Optus or Telstra stored customer data in such an easily accessible location, they wouldn't be in business for much longer after that... probably explains why it's so hard to find any information on their websites.

January 18 2011 at 9:45 PM Report abuse rate up rate down Reply
Anthony

Only shows the stupidity of people today.

January 18 2011 at 6:49 PM Report abuse rate up rate down Reply
mark

Typical stupid criminals. Yeah, since you don't have any friends in real life you turn to IRC where your speech is documented and then used against you. Brilliant.

January 18 2011 at 6:44 PM Report abuse rate up rate down Reply
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