NY man convicted by federal jury in iPad data breach case

NY man convicted by federal jury in iPad data breach caseOn Tuesday, 27-year-old New York man Andrew Auernheimer was convicted by a federal jury in Newark, New Jersey, in iPad data breach case, involving the hacking of AT&T servers and the pilfering of the personal data of over 120,000 iPad users.

According to the information shared by US Attorney Paul Fishman, Auernheimer was convicted of conspiracy as well as possession and transfer of the personal information of iPad users. Fishman also said that Auernheimer faces a maximum of ten-year prison sentence for both the counts.

As per the prosecutors, Auernheimer - a former Fayetteville, Ark., resident - was one of the members of an online "security research" group which tricked the AT&T website to disclose the email addresses of 120,000 iPad users, including New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg and film tycoon Harvey Weinstein, among others.

The prosecutors also said that the iPad users' personal information that the group stole from the AT&T servers was later shared with the Gawker website, which published the pilfered data in redacted form along with a news article about the breach.

Auernheimer, and another "security research" group member Daniel Spitler, was arrested and charged in January last year, after a flaw in AT&T website was discovered in 2010; and it was found that the security hole facilitated hackers' access to the e-mail addresses of the iPad users as well as their unique identifiers which are used for authenticating the iPads to AT&T's 3G wireless network.