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An unidentified man has been arrested in England in connection with the hack of VTech, a Hong Kong toy maker:
Police in England said they arrested a 21-year-old man on Tuesday in connection with last month's breach of VTech, a Hong Kong electronic toy maker, which exposed personal data for 12 million people, including 6.4 million minors. Hackers also made off with profile photos and chat logs of millions of parents and their children.
British police said they arrested the man, who has not been identified, in Bracknell, a town 32 miles outside of London, for breaking England's Computer Misuse Act, including "unauthorized access" to a computer and data, according to a statement released by Britain's South East Regional Organized Crime Unit.
Last month, VTech said its online database store was compromised by hackers. Among the stolen data were names, email addresses, passwords, profile information, mailing addresses and download histories belonging to parents, as well as names, genders and birth dates of children. The breach was notable for the fact that children's personal information was compromised. Security experts say children are a frequent target for identity thieves because their clean credit histories can be used to apply for government benefits, open bank and credit card accounts and apply for loans.
But the hacker believed to be behind the breach told Vice's Motherboard blog that he did not intend to sell or use the data, but instead to draw publicity to VTech's weak security practices. The hacker told Motherboard that he was able to breach two databases, containing personal data for millions of parents and children, using a simple hacking technique called a SQL injection, in which hackers enter commands that prompt a database to dump its contents.
Previously: Hack of Toy Maker VTech Exposes Families
(Score: 4, Insightful) by PizzaRollPlinkett on Wednesday December 16 2015, @12:23PM
So our "cyber" defenders finally caught a hacker! This is the lowest of the low hanging fruit, but they finally caught one. Have they ever caught anything but low-hanging fruit? This guy will have the book thrown at him because he's the only hacker they've caught in years, and we've spent billions on "cyber" this and "cyber" that and have to have something to show for it. Meanwhile, the corporation and its lowest-bidder software contractors (wouldn't you love to know who they outsourced their web development to?) aren't held accountable at all. If a hacker who can get caught by the "cyber" defenders can breach their defenses, then the corporation ought to have some culpability here, too. They'd just point fingers at their consultants, who would point fingers at some offshore company, who would point fingers at someone else. Plausible deniability is built into this stuff.
(E-mail me if you want a pizza roll!)
(Score: 3, Funny) by Gravis on Wednesday December 16 2015, @02:39PM
Plausible deniability is built into this stuff.
i think you mean "Plausible cyber deniability". ;)