British police make arrest in VTech hacking

On Tuesday, U.K. police arrested a 21-year-old man on suspicion of two offenses under the Computer Misuse Act: unauthorized access to a computer, and causing a computer to enable unauthorized access to data.

Security breaches are increasingly common, but last month parents paid special attention to one in particular as VTech, supplier of educational gadgets for children among other products, suffered a breach in its Learning Lodge app store. Police detained the man in Berkshire, England.

The hack exposed photos of millions of children, as well as chatlogs and internal databases.

The man was arrested by officers in the South East Regional Organized Crime Unit in Bracknell, which is about 30 miles west of London, according to the Wall Street Journal.

On November 24, 2015, VTech discovered that its databases had been remotely accessed and hacked, and that almost five million parent accounts and over six million related children’s profiles worldwide.

VTech did however specify that the database does not contain customer credit card information. The software lets registered customers download extra content such as games and e-books to their handheld devices.

Cybercrime, said law enforcement, is an issue that does not have any boundaries and it affects people on a local, regional as well as global level. The database also houses e-mail addresses, names, passwords, mailing addresses and download histories.

Details on customers from all over world, including the US, UK, France and China, were taken.

Some data was believed to have been posted for a brief time online prior to it being removed.

When details about the extent of the data loss became known security expert Troy Hunt said he had “run out of superlatives to even describe how bad” it was.

An investigation on behalf of consumers who had their data compromised by the massive data breach at VTech’s Learning Lodge was announced.