A list of 114,00 names and email addresses of iPad owners leaked to media blog Gawker.

An embarrassing security leak has revealed the names and email addresses of the first people to own an iPad in the US.

At least 114,000 people were on the list, including the chief executives of media brands like the New York Times, Dow Jones, Time and Bloomberg.

Military, NASA and Department of Justice addresses were also on there, next to the names of staff at tech giants Google, Microsoft, Amazon and AOL.

The names were obtained by exploiting a security hole at phone giant AT&T, which provides mobile plans for Apple products in the US.

A little-known security group compiled the list and handed it to media blog Gawker before allegedly alerting AT&T to the problem.

"We began poring through the 114,067 entries and were stunned at the names we found," wrote Gawker.

"The iPad 3G, released less than two months ago, has clearly been snapped up by an elite array of early adopters."

Gawker said the list held names from the government, military, media, finance and tech sectors, as well as a personal address appearing to belong to White House chief of staff Rahm Emanuel.

It's not clear if the incident will have more serious ramifications than the list of emails being leaked to the blog.

However Gawker said the New York Times had told its staff to turn off the 3G signal on their iPads just in case.

Gizmodo, a tech blog owned by the parent of Gawker, told its readers not to be particularly worried by the security hole.

"AT&T inadvertently made public every email address in its iPad database. It was just up to hackers to find them," Gizmodo said.

"It's possible that your email address has been ripped and sold, but my gut says it's pretty unlikely."

However even if the addresses were sold to shady figures, it probably would only result in an increase in spam emails.

"This isn't anything to lose sleep over," Gizmodo said.

AT&T has reportedly fixed the security hole and issued a statement apologising to customers.

Links

Apple's worst security breach on Gawker — http://gawker.com/5559346/apples-...
Should I be worried about it? on Gizmodo — http://gizmodo.com/5559586/should-i-w...