Surely you remember last week, when a security breach exposed the e-mail addresses of 114,000 owners of Apple iPads. Well, it took a few days, but AT&T finally got around to the point in the “taking it seriously” grieving process called “sort of admitting responsibility and promising not to do it again.”

In an e-mail to those iPad owners caught up in the brouhaha, AT&T’s Chief Privacy Officer — who they swear does not dress like a Star Wars Stormtrooper — said:

No other information was exposed… We apologize for the incident and any inconvenience it may have caused.

But of course, adds the Chief Privacy Officer, the real problem here isn’t AT&T’s complete and utter failure to secure the e-mail addresses… It’s the publicity-hungry security firm that hacked into and then distributed the addresses:

The hackers deliberately went to great efforts with a random program to extract… They then put together a list of these emails and distributed it for their own publicity.

For their part, the “hackers” say it was a breeze getting through AT&T’s chain-link fence security, writing in a blog post:
“The potential for this sort of attack and the number of iPad users on the list we saw who were stewards of major public and commercial infrastructure necessitated our public disclosure.”

AT&T Apologizes to IPad 3G Users for Security Breach [BusinessWeek]

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