VTech hack exposes personal data of 4.8M customers — and their kids

VTech, a maker of electronic toys for children, was recently hit with a major hack that exposed account information on 4.8 million customers. The information includes parent names, home addresses, email addresses and passwords. The theft also included 200,000 records related to the customers' children, including their "first names, genders and birthdays," according to Motherboard, the website that first reported the data breach.

Stolen info used to create profiles of victims

The stolen records did not include financial information, such as credit card numbers, according to a VTech press release addressing the breach. However, the data obtained by the hackers could potentially be combined with additional personal information on the victims and then used to create detailed profiles. Criminals could then use those to steal more valuable information, says Amit Ashbel, a "cyber security evangelist" with application security firm Checkmarx. "Hackers constantly collect as much data as they can," he says. "This could be the first step in a series of attacks." Continue reading this article here.