Two men were arrested Tuesday for allegedly hacking into ATT Inc.’s data servers that may have exposed the personal information and email addresses of about 120,000 users of Apple Inc.’s iPad, including several high-profile government and media figures.
Suspects Andrew Auernheimer and Daniel Spitler were taken into custody Tuesday, according to federal prosecutors. They have each been charged with conspiracy to access a computer without authorization and fraud in connection with personal information, US Attorney for the District of New Jersey Paul J. Fishman said Tuesday.
Both men will appear in court this afternoon — Spitler in a federal courtroom in Newark and Auernheimer in a federal courtroom in Arkansas. If found guilty, Spitler and Auernheimer both face up to five years in prison and a $250,000 fine. Both suspects would also have to reimburse ATT for the cost of the breach.
“Computer hacking is not a competitive sport and security breaches are not a game,” Fishman said at a press conference Tuesday. “We are dedicated to ensuring that we retain our privacy,” Fishman added.
“Cyber crime is evolving in ways we couldn’t imagine even a few years ago, but [law] enforcement is increasing at a rate that will meet the challenge.”
In June, ATT admitted that a security breach on the company’s website exposed the personal information of about 120,000 iPad owners.
According to Fishman, Spitler and Auernheimer committed a “brute force attack” on the ATT website by generating “huge numbers of random guesses” of serial numbers of purchased iPads. The serial number of each purchased iPad had been registered with the email address of the purchaser, allowing the hackers access to the stored information.
The code used to perpetrate the attack was designed by Spitler and was called “Slurper,” Fishman said.
Once the personal information was obtained by Spitler and Auernheimer, the two suspects sent the document “in unredacted form” to media and gossip website Gawker, Fishman said.
Among the high-profile politicians and media figures whose personal information was affected, according to Fishman: former Chief of Staff to the President Rahm Emanuel, New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg and film mogul Harvey Weinstein.
Fishman added that the suspects also exposed the personal information of a reporter at Reuters, a reporter at the San Francisco Chronicle and a board member at News Corp., which owns NewsCore.
According to Fox Business, the suspects also obtained access to the personal information of New York Times CEO Janet Robinson and ABC World News anchor Diane Sawyer.
To read more, go to FoxNews.com.
Article source: http://www.nypost.com/p/news/local/charged_with_stealing_ipad_users_aE1YEmGSaP4qWq0JPD0wHK?CMP=OTC-rssFEEDNAME=
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