Children's data exposed in VTech toy company hack

The hacker, whose identity was not revealed, said he or she was able to collect conversations and headshots from the company's Kid Connect service, which allows parents and kids to chat via a smartphone app and VTech tablet.

The hacked data at VTech included information about customers who download children's games, books and other educational content, the Hong Kong-based toy maker said.

VTech, a global supplier of electronic learning toys and products for children, confirmed a data breach Monday after an unauthorized party accessed information on Learning Lodge, the company's app store database. It is investigating the breach and says it has taken steps to prevent another one from happening.

The firm also reiterated Monday that its customer database does not contain any credit card information or personal identification data such as ID card numbers, Social Security numbers or driver's license numbers.

VTech said the breached database included names, email addresses, passwords, secret questions and answers for password retrieval, IP addresses, mailing addresses, download histories and children's names, genders and birth dates.

According to cybersecurity and privacy writer Lorenzo Franceschi-Bicchierai, stolen data includes names, email addresses, passwords and home addresses of nearly 4.83 million parents.

"VTech is a toymaker and I don't expect them to be security superstars". VTech customers also use Learning Lodge to register accounts, both for themselves and their children.

The hack occurred on November 14, according to the Times.

More than 5 million accounts were hacked, including hundreds of thousands of children's accounts, the company said.

What do you think of Vtech's data breach?

However, Motherboard stated that VTech failed to alert customers of the severity of the breach.

"There's enough detailed personal information in the stolen records to make those people targets for identity theft and fraud".