The Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) in the United States has launched a probe into an incident that led to the exposure of personal information of AT&T Inc. customers. Among the affected customers were White House chief of staff Rahm Emanuel and the mayor or New York City Michael Bloomberg.
A group calling itself Goatse Security was able to get information on over 100,000 AT&T iPad subscribers by exploiting a major bug on a script at an AT&T website. The group simply needed to insert an ICC-ID as part of a HTTP request to the vulnerable script which then returned the e-mail address associated with the specific iPad device.
AT&T has stressed that only e-mail address data was actually retrieved by the group and nothing more sensitive was at risk. Still, a collection of 114,000 active e-mail addresses has value by itself without even including the personal e-mail addresses of celebrities or government officials that were revealed.
“The FBI is aware of these possible computer intrusions and has opened an investigation to address the potential cyber threat,” FBI spokesman Jason Pack said. Apple’s iPad, which launched in April this year, has already sold over 2 million units.
Security experts, for the most part, maintain that the hype surrounding this hack has more to do with the fact that it involves an Apple device and some well-known names than with iPad or even AT&T security. “The hype around Apple products — like the new iPhone and iPad — is amazing. However, the reality is this type of vulnerability isn’t really news and happens all day long,” George Kurtz, chief technology officer for security software company McAfee, said.
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Result for: chief technology officer
BitTorrent Inc. has had a rough year. The company looking to make revenue from Bram Cohen’s file sharing software is just another company struggling in today’s turbulent economic climate. The company announced on Firday that it cut about half of its staff, and replaced its CEO Doug Walker. The company already experienced a 22% layoff back in August this year.
Eric Klinker, Chief Technology Officer (CTO) has been named as Walker’s replacement. He has “two decades of networking, content delivery, and management experience.” Walker had left Alias Systems just last year to take up the CEO position at BitTorrent.
“Klinker has…been instrumental to the continued development of the BitTorrent client, BitTorrent’s Delivery Network Accelerator (DNA) content delivery service, BitTorrent’s Software Development Kit (SDK) and BitTorrent’s proprietary advanced congestion control technology. The latter has been at the center of BitTorrent’s influential discussions and well-publicized collaboration with Comcast Corporation, as it seeks to deploy a protocol-agnostic network management solution.” A BitTorrent statement read.
According to the Times, the company is planning to shut down its BitTorrent Entertainment Network media store.
Result for: chief technology officer
Samsung and LG have announced that they plan to develop a new device that will allow for DTV on cellular devices.
“LG and Samsung are already world-class in digital TV and mobile communications. Through this collaboration, we also have an opportunity to lead the North American mobile DTV market,” said Woo Paik, LG president and chief technology officer.
There were no details or specifications on the product presented and there was no word on which standard was chosen to either. LG said there would be more details revealed later this year.
The proposed mobile DTV system will use current digital TV broadcast bandwidth and will not require the broadcasters to invest in much equipment.
“We will step up our effort to provide a technology that will benefit both consumers and broadcasters,” added Park Jong-woo, head of Samsung Electronics’ digital media division.
The plan is to hopefully see a rapid adoption by the Advanced Television Systes Committee (ATSC) of a common standard. The ATSC is the organization that adopts voluntary standards for DTV systems and plans to adopt a mobile DTV standard for the U.S. market in 2009.
The year 2009 is important as well because American analog television will end and DTV will become required.
