‘Pictures of children’ ‘in Vtech hack

The news of this hack, involving the identities of children, comes at a time when tech-based toys are among the most popular this holiday season. It involved customer data stored on the company’s Learning Lodge app store database.

It is now claimed that among the data accessed by the hacker included images of children, and chat logs between the children and their parents.

The digital toymaker VTech on Tuesday said that the data of over 6.3 million children was exposed in a hack that also compromised nearly 5 million parent accounts. Stolen data on their parents included name, mailing address, email address, secret question and answer for password retrieval, IP address, mailing address, download history and encrypted password.

The hacker who took the data has said that he was able to obtain 190GB of photos from the Vtech service, he or she also said the following about what they found on the company’s servers.

On Monday, VTech suspended 13 of its websites and said the affected customers were notified.

On Monday, VTech said an “unauthorized party” had hacked into its systems on November 14; the breach was discovered November 24. “When it’s hundreds of thousands of children including their names, genders and birthdates, that’s off the charts”, security analyst Troy Hunt wrote in a blog post.

Is Vtech contacting affected customers?

Last week, VTech, the digital toy maker revealed a biggie.

I have purchased Vtech toys for my children, and registered on the toy maker’s Learning Lodge site, and according to https://haveibeenpwned.com, my information and my children’s information were exposed in Vtech’s data hack. Hunt believes that users should not expect that VTech has shored up the breach yet. Its Learning Lodge app store is an online service which connects customers to numerous company’s products – including learning games, e-books, apps, and other educational content – and enables them to download those products. “People unwittingly trusting their personal information in a company that wasn’t equipped to handle it”. Share your comments below or on our Facebook page.