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Educational toymaker VTech's website was hacked. The data of about 5 million of its customers were stolen, the company confirmed on Saturday.
The hackers illegally entered the user database of VTech's Learning Lodge, its app stores for educational toys. They accessed the names, email addresses, mailing addresses, encrypted passwords and answers to secret questions of about 4.8 million parents and 200,000 children, according to Motherboard. They also stole the IP addresses and download histories of the website's users.
However, VTech said the hackers did not get any credit card data, social security numbers and driver's license of users which are not on its database, reports PCWorld. The hackers also got the names, genders and birthdays of the kids which could expose their real names and addresses since the data stolen make it possible to link the 200,000 children with the 4.8 million customers on the portal.
In response to the hack, VTech closed temporarily its Learning Lodge store and is working to improve the site's security.
Industry observers say that what happened to the Hong Kong-based VTech is a growing problem among small, non-financial companies that handle electronic customer data. They warned of more attacks in the future as these smaller firms collect more personal information of customers which are attractive to hackers.
Bryce Boland, chief technology officer of FireEye, a cyber security company, points out, "As larger companies implement stronger security measures, smaller companies become relatively easy targets for cyber crime," quotes Reuters.
Larry Salibra, founder and chief executive of Pay4Bugs, a bug-testing platform, believes VTech's data were not obscured at all or the obscuring was done improperly which explains why cyber criminals had an easy time stealing information from the toymaker.
