Hacking Vtech toys: millions of parents and children recovered data – L’Express

This is a piracy that is cold in the back, especially for the 5 million parents, who gave their offspring Vtech Tablet interactive, educational virtues. This “toy connected” for young children and marketed by the company based in Hong Kong could be a Trojan Horse. Indeed, a hacker has hacked its servers en masse on November 14. The company has realized, data theft, according to him, only 10 days later, only informing its customers that November 27th. It has made available on Twitter mail and telephone.

Millions of data can be recovered?

The site Motherboard , which revealed Friday scandal also raises Meanwhile the hard questions on data security of these objects a new generation. “Why is this information are kept on servers?”, Still wonders the site. This is also an anonymous hacker who alerted Motherboard on the download availability of such data, he could easily recover. New York Times understands that other hackers took advantage of these “gaps” in security Vtech servers, probably before him, and recovered this valuable information.

The consequences of this type of flight are considerable. For most worrisome could be coming. Millions of names, emails, passwords, IP addresses, birth dates of more than 200,000 children could be in the hands of hackers, whose identity and number are unknown. For now, this information is not available online. More troubling all images of children, sometimes their voice recordings, discussions passwords between children and parents are also very accessible for hacking the servers in question. In a statement Monday, the company wishes to reiterate that no credit card information was contained on its servers. Does it be enough to reassure the main stakeholders? Nothing is less sure.

Lawsuits and data protection

This case study illustrates the difficulty of connected tools companies, security of these words past. Alan Woodward, a professor at the University of Surrey in southern England, cyber security expert on the BBC believes that these hacks “endemic” and must “stop”.

At the judicial level, surveys should be conducted on piracy in Connecticut and Illinois, reveals Reuters. Similarly in Hong Kong. The Commissioner of Data Protection Stephen Wong has assured that an investigation of “compliance monitoring” would be conducted to Vtech to verify that the company has followed the principles of protection of such confidential information.

The concern with regard to connected objects including toys that grow. The new Barbie doll from Mattel is also prone to distrust of parents and associations, who fear such a hacking their wifi.