AT&T has just apologized for a security breach the company found on it's website that leaked 114,000 email addresses of personal and corporate users. On June 9th, the email addresses of US Military members, as well as executives at media, financial, and technology companies and top political leaders such as New York Times Chief Executive Officer Janet Robinson and New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg were all stolen by a group of hackers.
“No other information was exposed,” Dorothy Attwood, AT&T’s chief privacy officer said in an e-mail sent yesterday to accounts that may have been affected. “We apologize for the incident and any inconvenience it may have caused.”
“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 emails and distributed it for their own publicity.”
Goatse Security, a company hired by AT&T to find and close security gaps, said that the flaw was found in about an hour. In that time, all the damage had already been done. Perhaps more disturbing than just the fact that something like this could happen is that it could be done so fast!
AT&T fell 12 cents to $25.17 at 4:01 p.m. in New York Stock Exchange composite trading. The shares have dropped 10 percent this year.
Shawn
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