Gawker Media LLC said the Federal Bureau of Investigation asked it to retain documents as part of a probe into the exposure of email addresses belonging to iPad owners, the second time the blog publisher has been in a legal spotlight over a big news story it wrote involving Apple Inc.
The New York-based media company said Friday it had been contacted by the FBI to preserve the information, but Gawker Media said it doesn't believe it is a target of the probe. The FBI said Thursday it opened a probe but hasn't said what it may be investigating.
Gawker's Valleywag section wrote Wednesday about a glitch in AT&T Inc.'s website that exposed the email addresses of iPad owners, including politicians, military officials and media executives.
"There's always blowback when you break a big story," Remy Stern, the editor-in-chief of Gawker.com, said Friday.
He said the AT&T story has become one of the most popular ever at Gawker Media, whose collection of sites include gadget blog Gizmodo and women's site Jezebel.
The post from Wednesday has been clicked on 850,000 times so far, Mr. Stern said. Gawker.com on Wednesday had about 2.8 million page views, about 75% more than total page views for a typical weekday, according to Mr. Stern.
View Full Image Associated Press IPads shown at an Apple store in New York in April.
Mr. Stern said he and Valleywag editor Ryan Tate spent all night Tuesday verifying the data file from a group of computer experts that calls itself Goatse Security, which had identified the AT&T breach and sought to publicize it.
Gawker verified the information and only posted partial email addresses. Mr. Stern said it didn't want to disclose potentially sensitive email addresses or the unique iPad ID numbers.
Mr. Stern and Goatse Security said Gawker Media didn't compensate the group for the scoop.
In a blog post defending Goatse Security's actions, a member of the group said it only gave the data to Gawker and later destroyed it. The member added: "The rhetoric, tone, and outlet we chose for our disclosure is free speech, plain and simple."
Gawker Media continues to be involved in a possible criminal investigation in California related to its April disclosure of details about a new iPhone device that Apple had been keeping secret.
Gawker's Gizmodo blog broke news of the new iPhone after it paid for a prototype of the device it said was mislaid by an Apple employee. Apple notified authorities about the missing phone, and the police seized a Gizmodo editor's computers.
Apple didn't respond to a request for comment Friday, and an AT&T spokesman declined to comment.
Write to Shira Ovide at shira.ovide@wsj.com
The United States Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) has launched a probe into a security breach that allowed hackers to retrieve 114,000  addresses of  users on the  network.

The FBI announced the investigation Friday, which will determine exactly what allowed a group of hackers using the name "Goatse Security" to access the data. The security breach was first announced by the   on Wednesday. The FBI has since asked Gawker Media LLC, the owners of the site, to retain all information relating to the incident. The company was also involved in another recent case with Apple Inc., which included the . Gawker said that it does not believe it is the main target of this FBI investigation.

Editors at Gawker were able to verify the information the hackers sent to them, and did not post full e-mail addresses or any other identifying information in its initial story of the incident. Gawker said that it did not pay Goatse Security for the data. One of the hackers later wrote that they did not reveal the addresses to anyone else and had already deleted them.

The hackers were able to obtain the data after discovering a program on AT&T's website that provides the e-mail address of a user when that user's identification number is given. The hackers essentially guessed and then saved the numbers for the 114,000 users. They did not tell AT&T of the security hole.

A spokesperson for AT&T said Wednesday that the company "was informed by a business customer on Monday of the potential exposure of their iPad ICC-IDs the identification numbers", and had disabled the e-mail-providing program by Tuesday. AT&T also said that no other information was stolen other than the e-mails addresses of their customers, and that "there is no evidence that any other customer information was shared." The company says it will notify all of the iPad users whose information was compromised.

Many of the users involved are high-ranking government or corporate officials, including , the current , and Michael Bloomberg, the mayor of New York City. Others include employees of Google and the .

Apple has not commented about the breach.