Smart Teddy Bears which serve as toys to kids are leaking private voice recordings to hackers. Thus, Hackers are now holding these messages for ransom and are demanding $1190 worth of bitcoins as a payoff from parents. The recordings include some private conversations happening between couples captured via the toy.
As per a report published in Daily Mail, the company named ‘Spiral Toys’ which manufactures teddy bears for kids is being scrutinized for this data heist saga. So far, the cyber attack on the said company is said to have leaked more than 800,000 accounts of user details to hackers and hasn’t informed the affected families till date.
Daily Mail’s post specified that the leak exposed millions of private conversations of families, including voice recordings of their child alone with the toy. The conversations were available on a portal for several days and then were forwarded to the cyber criminals by an anonymous source.
Despite knowing all these facts, the cloud pets manufacturing company hasn’t informed any of the families affected. What’s more annoying is the fact that Spiral Toys are not protected with a firewall or passwords.
Note- Cloud Pets are the toys (usually bears) which allow parents or guardians to pass on messages to & fro (through embedded microphones) to the playing kids on a remote basis through smart apps or similar toys. These toys allow kids send messages to their parent’s smartphone via an application. Then the parent can then respond through their phone which is then sent to the toy bear.
If Spiral Toys had a protected database, this cyber heist could have been prevented very easily. But as its database lacked the basic security features, cybercrooks managed to steal the data.
Therefore, we can come to an easy conclusion that internet connected services can not only do wonderful things but can also present new risks to customers.
More details will be updated as soon as Spiral Toys reacts to the media reports.
