The Apple iPad has gotten off to a great start as far as the book business is concerned — it’s cornered 22% of the ebook market in its few short months of existence, as MobyLives reported just the other day.

But now, the iPad has run into a little problem. As a Gawker story reported late yesterday, “A security breach has exposed iPad owners including dozens of CEOs, military officials, and top politicians. They—and every other buyer of the cellular-enabled tablet—could be vulnerable to spam marketing and malicious hacking.” In short, “The breach … exposed the most exclusive email list on the planet, a collection … that includes thousands of A-listers in finance, politics and media, from New York Times Co. CEO Janet Robinson to Diane Sawyer of ABC News to film mogul Harvey Weinstein to Mayor Michael Bloomberg. It even appears that White House Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel‘s information was compromised.”

According to Gawker, “114,000 user accounts have been compromised, although it’s possible that confidential information about every iPad 3G owner in the U.S. has been exposed.”

Apparently, a group calling itself Goatse Security — which “has previously highlighted real security vulnerabilities in the Firefox and Safari Web browsers” — “obtained its data through a script on AT&T‘s website, accessible to anyone on the internet.”

So what kind of data did Goatse obtain? “The specific information exposed in the breach included subscribers’ email addresses, coupled with an associated ID used to authenticate the subscriber on AT&T’s network, known as the ICC-ID. ICC-ID stands for integrated circuit card identifier and is used to identify the SIM cards that associate a mobile device with a particular subscriber.”

Neither Apple nor AT&T responded to calls from Gawker.