With AT&T recently leaving sensitive personal data on 114,000 owners of the iPad 3G exposed on the Web, the security flaw was exploited by a black hat hacker group - called Goatse Security - that published the hacked e-mail addresses of the iPad 3G owners.

Going by a Gawker report, the e-mail addresses published by the hacker group, whose intent still remains undisclosed, included those of several high profile iPad 3G customers, including CEOs of bigwig companies, leading politicians, and military officials.

The list of people affected by the data breach includes the New York Times Co. CEO Janet Robinson; Diane Sawyer; Harvey Weinstein; Mayor Michael Bloomberg; William Eldredge; and top executives at Time Warner, News Corporation, Dow Jones, HBO, Viacom, and Hearst.

According to Gawker, the hackers managed to obtain the information apparently by using their iPad 3G SIM cards to launch automated script attacks on AT&T's Web-based server.

However, the data breach did not include more sensitive information like credit card or home address, which can reportedly be compromised only with a stronger spam filter.

As such, noting that the data breach does not carry any real security concern, an AT&T spokesman said: "AT&T was informed by a business customer on Monday of the potential exposure of their iPad ICC IDS. The only information that can be derived from the ICC IDS is the e-mail address attached to that device."