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 latest massive hack attack, this one targeting toy company Vtech, proves that anyone – kids included – are vulnerable to hackers.
Almost 200,000 children who use products of Hong Kong-based VTech have been exposed in an online security breach along with details of almost 5 million parents.
The alarming breach, apparently perpetrated by a white hat hacker on a mission to reveal cracks in VTech’s security protocols, was first uncovered by Motherboard.
The company said child profile information only includes name, gender and date of birth.
According to the report by Motherboard, the company actually left sensitive data, which included the photos on its servers, this also included chat logs between parents and their children, this information was found in the company’s Kid Connect service which lets parents communicate with their kids on Vtech devices.
VTech confirmed Monday that the database contains user profile information including name, email address, password, secret question and answer for password retrieval, IP address, mailing address and download history. The firm said that the attack happened on its Learning Lodge application store.
VTech makes digital toys and electronic learning tools.
“Taking security seriously is something you need to do before a data breach, not something you say afterwards to placate people”, Hunt wrote in his blog.
VTech has reached out to every account holder in the database, via email, to alert them of the breach and the potential exposure of their account data.
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It’s unclear why VTech was targeted, but attorneys general in IL and CT announced that they will investigate the incident.
