Gawker, the people that own Gizmodo, still sucking hard

by Justin Horn on Jun 9th, 2010 @ 6:38 pm

Gawker keeps releasing negative Apple stories just because their feelings are hurt after the bought stolen property that belonged to Apple. The latest headline “Apple’s Worst Security Breach: 114,000 iPad Owners Exposed” seems to blame Apple for an AT&T screwup.

FastCompany reporting on it with a bit more truth than Gawker:

Goatse figured out a way to have AT&T provide email addresses for subscribers, using what’s called an ICC-ID. The ICC-ID identifies a SIM card, thus linking a customer with a device. Each AT&T customer has an individual ICC-ID. Without going into too much hackery language, AT&T has a script on its website that will return an email address if the ICC-ID is provided. Goatse managed to use it by guessing a huge swath of ICC-IDs based on a few real ones–they all have similar patterns–and feeding them into the script.

The funny thing is it’s not even potential security threat either, except maybe a bit of additional spam as FastCompany points out:

At the very worst, it briefly put iPad 3G subscribers at risk of spamming. It’s a sexy story, since it involves celebrities, the iPad, and security leaks, but it’s really a very minor one as far as those go.

So yes, AT&T did screw up and this isn’t good and lucky it wasn’t that big of a deal, but the main point here is this had nothing to do with Apple.

UPDATE Looks like even Gizmodo get’s it better than their parent Gawker

Follow me on Twitter @justin_horn

View 1 Comments
Apple vs ?, iPad

1.
1. anonymous

   June 15th, 2010 10:02 am

   

   Did you really write the word “get’s”? Really? Like apostrophes much?

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