If you were thinking about buying a smart toy for Christmas, the Vtech hack may have led you to think again. For many parents the thought of their children's personal data being stolen and made available online is the stuff of nightmares.
So what exactly is a smart toy and should you be avoiding them in favour of a more traditional stocking filler this year?
This time, the company promises more security.
TechRadar
While there are lots of advantages to living in the digital age, there are some things that make it an even more frightening time, such as the higher chances of having our personal information stolen. Unfortunately, there's only so much we can do to prevent ourselves. It can be a massive disruption if our information is compromised, especially if it's stolen from a company we've entrusted to keep our private data secure.
Huffington Post: It was not an auspicious beginning to the holiday season. On Black Friday, we learned that a hacker had broken into the servers of Chinese toymaker VTech and lifted the personal information of nearly five million parents and more than 200,000 children. The data haul included home addresses, names, birth dates, email addresses, and passwords. Worse still, it had photographs and chat logs of parents with their children.
The exploit raised the obvious question: as more toys become connected to the Internet, how many have lax security? And how many millions, or hundreds of millions, of children are in danger due to it? We got a partial answer on Dec. 4, when Bluebox Security discovered serious vulnerabilities in Mattel's Hello Barbie, the Internet-connected version of the iconic doll toy. It is entirely possible that the majority of Internet-connected toys have serious vulnerabilities. There are many reasons for this.
