As many as 5 million parents and 200,000 children had their personal information exposed, according to Motherboard, who first reported the story and is in contact with the hacker responsible for the breach.
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The company’s statement said the children’s profiles included only name, gender and birth date.
More than 5 million accounts were hacked, including hundreds of thousands of children’s accounts, the company said. The database of the company’s Learning Lodge app store, which allows customers to download apps, e-books and learning games, was breached on November 14 HKT (Hong Kong Time).
VTech has temporarily suspended its Learning Lodge website following the breach.
VTech said it emailed every account holder to notify them of the breach.
Following the hacking of its Learning Lodge app database, Hong Kong-based Vtech began suspending 13 websites and simulatenously alerting the public on 27 November.
The breach did not contain personal identification data, such as ID card numbers, Social Security numbers, driving license numbers, or even credit card information.
This morning, cyber security experts are weighing in and some say VTech should have done more to prevent this from happening.
Motherboard reports that photos of children and their parents were also vulnerable.
“We are committed to protecting our customer information and their privacy, to ensure against any such incidents in the future”, said the company in its statement.
As the full scope of this hack comes to light, things aren’t looking too good for VTech. Hunt added that the security flaws could have been identified by VTech “if only they’d looked”.
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In another major concern, the photos, chat logs and recordings stolen from the company’s server can be traced back to specific usernames, meaning those in possession of the hacked material could potentially track down and identify the people using VTech’s products. However, the data obtained by the hackers could potentially be combined with additional personal information on the victims and then used to create detailed profiles. Tech Insider reached out to VTech for comment and will update the story as soon as we hear back.
