Educational toymaker, VTech Holdings, has announced that 11.6 million accounts were compromised in a cyber attack they experienced on November 24, 2015.
Among the millions of individuals affected by the breach includes that of 6.4 million children, leaking children’s personal names, their genders as well as birth dates.
United States account holders have been said to be among the most affected by this breach, ranking in 2.2 million parents and 2.8 million children affected, with France, the U.K., Germany, and Canada rounding out the top 5 countries hit. This particular breach affected the customer database of Learning Lodge, an application store for VTech’s devices, as well as the Kid Connect servers. Since the breach, both of these services have been suspended as well as thirteen websites affiliated with VTech.
Of the 11.6 million accounts affected, 4.8 million belong to parents with the leaked information including names, email addresses, passwords, security questions for password retrieval, IP addresses, mailing addresses and download history. Unencrypted call logs from the VTech messaging service, Kid Connect, as well as encrypted audio files are also believed to have been compromised, but the investigation is still ongoing.
The anonymous hacker made a statement to Motherboard stating they were able to access VTech’s data by using an SQLi injection; inserting malicious commands into the website's forms and ultimately tricking it into returning other data. The hacker was then able to infiltrate VTech’s web & database server gaining full control of the systems.
While this particular hacker said that they don’t intend to publish any of the data publicly, it’s quite possible that others hackers may have exfiltrated it first. The hacker also went on to say, “It was pretty easy to dump, so someone with darker motives could easily get it.”
The company announced plans to hire a security firm to conduct a forensic investigation into this breach and to “help us design a more secure approach to our data security.”
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Read this article on CSO Online
Read VTech’s Data Breach Press Release
Read Motherboards Interview with the Hackers