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Hacker Pleads Guilty in AT&T iPad Breach

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Original poster
Apr 12, 2001
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Daniel Spitler pleaded guilty Thursday to two felony charges related to the publishing of 120,000 AT&T customers' email addresses on Gawker.com. One other member of hacking group "Goat-se Security", Andrew Auernheimer, was charged as well and is still in plea bargain negotiations. Spitler's plea agreement recommends a 12-18 month sentence.
According to reports and court filings, they wrote a script that guessed the ICC-ID numbers (used to identify the iPad's SIM card) and then queried AT&T's website until it returned an e-mail address. Spitler had been accused of co-authoring this software, called "iPad 3G Account Slurper."
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The original breach occurred in June of last year. The hackers discovered a security hole on AT&T's website that allowed users to plug in a SIM card identifier called an ICC-ID, and receive back the email address connected to that SIM card.

More than 114,000 email addresses were disclosed including the personal email addresses of a number of high-profile political and business figures, though it appears no actual damage occurred beyond the exposure of the email addresses.

Article Link: Hacker Pleads Guilty in AT&T iPad Breach
 
Article Link
https://www.macrumors.com/2011/06/23/hacker-pleads-guilty-in-att-ipad-breach/
Last edited by a moderator:
U

unlinked

macrumors 6502a
Jul 12, 2010
698
1,217
Ireland
supmango said:
Remind me again what AT&T got for this? Oh, that's right. A slap on the wrist.
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Did they even get a slap for this?

What did the guys plead guilty to anyway? It sounds like all they did was download info AT&T made available on their site. It AT&T had put all that info in a single txt file would downloading it have been a crime?
 
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NoExpectations

macrumors 6502a
Sep 23, 2008
672
3
supmango said:
Remind me again what AT&T got for this? Oh, that's right. A slap on the wrist.
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It's also easy to steal merchandise in a store, why would a store get punished when someone steals from them?

AT&T got more than a slap....bad PR is hard to recover from.

Hackers are criminals. They should realize that.
 
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iphoneblack

macrumors member
May 21, 2008
62
0
Wirelessly posted (Mozilla/5.0 (iPhone; U; CPU iPhone OS 4_3_3 like Mac OS X; en-us) AppleWebKit/533.17.9 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/5.0.2 Mobile/8J2 Safari/6533.18.5)

Not from ATT & apple for sure
 
gnasher729

gnasher729

Suspended
Nov 25, 2005
17,980
5,565
RawBert said:
I wonder how many job offers he's received because of this. :rolleyes:
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Zero. Hacking doesn't exactly take a genius, and it shows lack of morals and in this case lack of good judgement. Getting caught makes it worse. Not exactly what recommends you to any employer.

Look at it like this: If I did something bad that costs a customer lots of money, my company will say "well, we couldn't expect that; he came well recommended, had no complaints about him for years; no idea why he suddenly sold your customer data to a competitor; not our fault". If a convicted hacker did the same thing, my company would be in deep trouble, because any jury would say that the damage is their fault for hiring a known criminal.
 
L

logandzwon

macrumors 6502a
Jan 9, 2007
574
2
Releasing personal info was bad mojo. IF they are being giving time for that, maybe I can understand. For actually gathering the information and doing the "hack" I think at most they should get a small fine and community service hours.
 
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supmango

macrumors 6502
Feb 17, 2008
413
0
NoExpectations said:
It's also easy to steal merchandise in a store, why would a store get punished when someone steals from them?

AT&T got more than a slap....bad PR is hard to recover from.

Hackers are criminals. They should realize that.
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A store that is holding YOUR merchandise for you would have some accountability if they allowed it to be stolen.

A better analogy is a museum that is holding a collection of valuable artifacts from some other museum or group of museums. Don't you think there would be some kind of retribution if the museum was robbed? Especially if the robbery was due to a flaw in the security of the museum.

Obviously the value of the merchandise (data) should be considered. But more than likely some rather important people had their email addresses exposed.

I agree the hackers should be punished, but that does not negate AT&T's responsibility.
 
waterskier2007

waterskier2007

macrumors 68000
Jun 19, 2007
1,871
228
Novi, MI
Am I the only one who could care less if my email was "leaked". Sure, what they did is wrong but I think people blow things out of proportion a lot...
 
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burtonrider117

macrumors newbie
Jun 23, 2011
2
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Wirelessly posted (Mozilla/5.0 (iPhone; U; CPU iPhone OS 4_3_3 like Mac OS X; en-us) AppleWebKit/533.17.9 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/5.0.2 Mobile/8J2 Safari/6533.18.5)

I can not believe that companies like at&t can get hacked by some guy sitting in their bedroom and they're not the ones standing trial! It's far from okay and irresponsible on their part.
 
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mylios101

macrumors newbie
Feb 16, 2008
23
0
Writing a script to guess some numbers and querying AT&T's website is in no way hacking anything.
 
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pmjoe

macrumors 6502
Mar 27, 2009
468
36
Both this article and the one linked saying they pled guilty left me totally confused as to what they actually did. It sounds like all they did was discover that if you went to a certain public URL on one of AT&T's servers and gave it a valid SIM number, it'd give an email address back that was associated with that SIM number. It wasn't even clear to me if the people who were charged did anything with the data, and it sounded to me like they may have reported the security hole.

Wow, really?!? You can get a maximum of 10 years for downloading data from a public web server? What was the charge??? Who decides which data makes it a criminal offense?
 
Rodimus Prime

Rodimus Prime

macrumors G4
Oct 9, 2006
10,136
4
mylios101 said:
Writing a script to guess some numbers and querying AT&T's website is in no way hacking anything.
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no but it shows AT&T system had crap security and there is no denying that. It depends how it is done if you get a job offer.
One guy wrote a script to test something security wise on face book and turned out it spread like wild fire. Now Facebook offered him a job but it took some pretty fancy work to exploit the flaw and even find it. On top of that he made no attempted to even hide who he was when he did it. It just spread a lot father than he planned on because at first it was just a test to see if it could be done.
he told facebook exactly how he did it and what the hole he found. They gave him a job but that was more of a white hacker example.
 
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orfeas0

macrumors 6502a
Aug 21, 2010
971
1
Athens, Greece
NoExpectations said:
It's also easy to steal merchandise in a store, why would a store get punished when someone steals from them?

AT&T got more than a slap....bad PR is hard to recover from.

Hackers are criminals. They should realize that.
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Ok so someone hacked and got a bunch of e-mail addresses. Did he exploit/steal anyone? No. He even helped at&t by pointing out that security breach before someone else with worse intentions hacked it.
And you think that person should rot in jail for a year and more? Have you seen how is a jail inside? It's not easy to go in there you know. And especially for someone who didn't commit such a big crime...
 
0

0997853

Suspended
Feb 5, 2011
125
110
Europe
gnasher729 said:
Zero. Hacking doesn't exactly take a genius, and it shows lack of morals and in this case lack of good judgement. Getting caught makes it worse. Not exactly what recommends you to any employer.
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And that is how hackers get bad reputation... Maybe people should google more about hacker vs cracker.
 
H

Holoshed

macrumors regular
Mar 24, 2011
126
0
North Carolina
mylios101 said:
Writing a script to guess some numbers and querying AT&T's website is in no way hacking anything.
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Exactly! The general public has no idea what a script kiddie is vs a hacker and the media has branded hacker as someone who is "out to destroy all computers."

To be honest I really am not sure what of this was illegal except maybe posting the emails.

It's like a website that gives the current time when polled and someone writes a script to poll it every second.

If no password or security is offered it is not hacking. Through my web travels I find numerous examples of this, the worst is one of AT&Ts competitors but anyhow...
 
A

AppleDude

macrumors member
Jun 14, 2006
51
9
dethmaShine said:
Well, the punishment is due.
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I'm no anarchist but from my perspective, these folks did the world a huge favor. By exposing a security flaw without any malicious intentions, they have made use all a little safer from those who possess the same skills but use their powers for evil. So I tip my hats to them and would like to see the most lenient sentencing the law permits.
 
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