Two men charged in case of iPad data theft
updated 01:05 pm EST, Wed January 19, 2011
Confirms connection to June incident
As anticipated, two suspects have been charged in the matter of iPad customer data stolen from AT&T, according to a spokesperson for Paul Fishman, the US attorney for New Jersey. Bloomberg reports that the first suspect is Daniel Spitler, a 26-year-old from San Francisco. The other is Andrew Auernheimer, a 25-year-old from Fayetteville, Arkansas.
Prosecutors allege that the pair hacked into AT&T servers in June and stole e-mail addresses and other private information for about 120,000 iPad owners. Some of the victims were extremely influential, including New York City mayor Michael Bloomberg, and then White House Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel. Auernheimer was arrested the same month, but on drug charges rather than anything directly connected to hacking.
AT&T apologized to customers for the data theft but is not commenting on the criminal charges. Due to the hackers targeting AT&T rather than Apple, only 3G iPad owners were affected. Auernheimer has claimed that the group he belonged to, Goatse Security, only wanted to help people protect themselves.
