Hackers were able to pull childrens’ photos, chat logs and other personal data stored in VTech accounts, according to blogger Troy Hunt, who tracks data security breaches and said he was the first to notify VTech about the hack. “Clearly manufacturers should be taking greater care over data security and privacy, but parents should also be more careful with their children’s personal information”, he explained in an email to FoxNews.com.
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More than 5 million accounts were hacked, including hundreds of thousands of children’s accounts, the company said.
In its original announcement, VTech had stated its Learning Lodge was compromised; soon after, the company revealed that its Kid Connect messaging app, which is included on the maker’s tablets, was also targeted.
The stolen customer information from the VTech database includes names, birth dates, and genders of child users.
When Motherboard reached out to VTech for comment, the company’s spokesperson responded, “We were not aware of this unauthorized access until you alerted us”.
Digital toymaker VTech Holdings Ltd said on Tuesday that data on about 6.4 million children was exposed in a hack of information on customers in more than a dozen countries.
VTech, which is based in Hong Kong, announced to the public on Friday that hackers had accessed the information of about 5 million adults; today they announced that the number of children who had their information exposed exceeded the adults.
CT and IL said on Monday they plan to investigate the breach.
“The Vtech breach illustrates one of the major issues facing us today”, said Tod Beardsley, security engineering manager at internet security firm Rapid7.
It reckons that the breach happened in the middle of this month and exposed customer data hot off the database. Learning Lodge allows its customers to download apps, learning games, e-books and other educational content to their VTech products.
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The company said the database did not include credit card information, ID card numbers, Social Security numbers or drivers licence numbers.
