Before all of you parents go running out to your closest toy store (if
you haven’t already) to get your child one of the latest tech toys from VTech,
there are a couple things that you may want to be aware of. First and foremost is the fact that in
November VTech was hacked and was found to be storing the personal data of
roughly 5.2 million people, mostly adults but children too. The second is that
some of the information that was accessed contained a significant amount of
chat logs and pictures that are part of VTech’s Kid Connect service, which allows parents to text or chat with
their children using the VTech tablet via a smartphone app. So many might be thinking, “Chat logs and
pictures? What’s the big deal?” Well, I
can think of many mischievous ways in which our cyber connected world can use
this data.
What immediately comes to
mind is the hack that has highest rate of success: social engineering. Social
engineering is “is a non-technical method of intrusion
hackers use that relies heavily on human interaction and often involves
tricking people into breaking normal security procedures” (social engineering definition). Having a wealth of information about the
potential target increases the chances of success exponentially because you
already have plenty of conversation starters to craft that “trust relationship”
by creating small talk. The other thing that
comes to mind is identity theft. Not in
the near future, but later down the road.
If the hackers that gleaned that information wanted, they could
potentially have more than enough identities to defraud for years to come. All it would take is patience and just holding
onto the children’s information for a few years until they come of age and then
you cleverly start down the list of potential targets who will have long since
forgotten, and perhaps never even knew that a significant amount of their personal
data had been compromised many years back.
Well, I suppose that perhaps maybe it’s not that big of a deal though when
in today’s day and age it’s the social norm for personal lives of people to be on
display for the world to see on Facebook, Twitter, or Instagram. So is it really any wonder that we have all
of the cybercrime that we do? I don’t
think so. If anything, I’m surprised
that there isn’t more of it. I say that
we’ve created a Cyber-Cedar Point for hackers where our lives are the main amusement
of the park. It’s not a matter of if the
hackers will take a spin, it’s a matter of when the line dwindles down enough
for them to get on board. I honestly
wonder sometimes if it’s a lack of security awareness or if it’s really that
people just don’t care.
