Categories: OLD Media Moves

Was iPad breach story ignored by mainstream business media?

Taylor Buley of Forbes reports that the iPad hacking breach via AT&T story broken Wednesday by Ryan Tate at Valleywag was offered first to mainstream business media such as Reuters and the San Francisco Chronicle, but they ignored the story.

Buley writes, “According to ‘Weev,’ a well known Internet ‘activist’ who we likened to Shakespeare’s Puck after a baffling Amazon.com security incident last year, the ‘Goatse’ security group alerted various members of the mainstream press via email before granting Gawker’s Tate an exclusive on the data.

“‘i disclosed this to other press organizations first (ones who had ipad users affected by the breach, lol) and was ignored,’ writes Weev in an email. ‘gawker found out and ran with it immediately.’

“To prove it, Weev sent Forbes copies of emails sent to press at Reuters, News Corp, The Washington Post and The San Francisco Chronicle. The veracity of the emails has not been confirmed, but each has a timestamp dating back to Sunday night.

“One of the purported emails is included at the bottom of this post. For privacy, some information has been redacted but it was addressed to 11 Reuters email addresses, including editor@reuters.com and reuters@reuters.com.”

Read more here. Robert MacMillan, a Reuters reporter and editor, Tweets Wednesday night that he does not recognize any of the e-mail addresses at Reuters.

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View Comments

setty says:
June 10, 2010 at 12:42 am
Your last sentence isn't much of a surprise. Reuters and other news organizations often make it difficult for people with breaking news to alert them to what's going on. I don't know what they are scared of, but the current iPad breach story, for example, has no e-mail or phone contact info for its reporters. Trust me, as someone who was at Bloomberg for years, with my e-mail published on every story, the only problem was the occasional kook in Internetlandia demanding more information about some obscure story. For the most part, the added interactivity with readers was a pleasure.