DANGER, DANGER: According to Vice's Motherboard, an anonymous hacker has retrieved the names, email addresses, passwords, and home addresses of 4.8 million parents and the first names, genders and birthdays of more than 200,000 kids from Chinese company VTech, which sells kids' toys and parenting gadgets.
(Update: Motherboard now reports that the hack has affected nearly 6.4 million children's accounts, bringing the total hacked accounts to more than 10 million.)
The hacker expressed no plans for the data, though with the relative ease of the hack, it is clear that others could have done the same. Security expert Troy Hunt showed how simple the attack was by replicating it. Motherboard points out that it would be possible to link the children to their parents, exposing their home addresses and last names.
When Motherboard reached out to VTech for comment, the company's spokesperson responded, “We were not aware of this unauthorized access until you alerted us.”
According to Have I Been Pwned, Hunt's repository of data breaches (you can search your own email there!), this is the fourth largest breach of consumer data in history. Hunt believes that users should not expect that VTech has shored up the breach yet.
