And that's likely because, like most IOT gear makers, it didn't much think about it.
VTech didn't respond to questions regarding why it needed to store all this data. In short, Vtech was gathering and saving pretty much anything these devices could get their hands on.
What's more, the hack revealed that Vtech was storing kid selfies, voice recordings, and even entire chat logs between parents and their kids. Once inside, the hacker obtained the names, email addresses, passwords, and home addresses of 4,833,678 parents, and the first names, genders and birthdays of more than 200,000 kids. Late last week a hacker revealed that he (or she) had hacked into the servers of Hong-Kong-based toy company Vtech, exposing the data collected by the company's "Kid Connect" service (which lets parents use smartphones to talk to kids using toy tablets and other devices). In all these examples the story remains the same: everybody's so excited to connect everything and anything to the internet, few companies can be bothered to do so intelligently and correctly.Īnd with the mad rush to bring this kind of aggressive myopia to toys, the lack of security is now impacting kids as well. That's been made painfully apparent by "smart" refrigerators that expose your Gmail credentials, "smart" TVs that transmit your living room conversations unencrypted, or "smart" tea kettles that compromise your Wi-Fi network security. As companies race to embrace the inanely-named "internet of things" (IOT), security and privacy are usually a very distant afterthought.
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