In a statement issued today, VTech announced that 6.4 million kids were affected by the data breach disclosed last week.
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While the hack was damaging enough for the company, Vice reported that other forms of sensitive data was also left on VTech’s servers, including the photos of many children using the company’s products and the chat logs between children and their parents.
The breach affected the customer database for Learning Lodge, an app store for VTech’s devices, as well as the Kid Connect servers.
Other accessible data included children’s names, genders and birthdates – along with account email addresses, passwords, secret questions and answers for password retrieval, IP addresses, mailing addresses and download history.
CT and IL said on Monday they plan to investigate the breach.
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.
Some 4.9 million parent accounts and about 6.7 million kid profiles were jeopardized as part of the breach, according to a statement published on the company’s website.
Citing the hacker who claimed responsibility for the hack, Motherboard reports that the personal data of more than 200,000 children has been exposed. The Kid Connect platform enables parents to chat via smartphone app with their kid using a VTech tablet. “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.
There remains no evidence the hacker in the breach is seeking to profit from the data or cause harm to those affected. “Always think carefully about the information you share”. “VTech should have the book thrown at them”. To complete the payment or check-out process of any downloads made on the Learning Lodge website, its customers are directed to a secure, third party payment gateway.
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The company added that no credit card information was involved, and it has taken measures “to defend against further attacks”.
