Enlarge (credit: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EcxNHgYUz6s)
A maker of Internet-connected stuffed animal toys has leaked a database of sensitive customer data. The leak includes more than 2 million voice recordings of children and parents, as well as e-mail addresses and password data for more than 800,000 accounts.
The data was left in a publicly available database that wasn’t protected by a password, according to a blog post published Monday by Troy Hunt. Hunt maintains Have I Been Pwned?, a website devoted to breach disclosure. He said searches using the Shodan computer search engine and other evidence indicated that, since December 25 and January 8, the customer data was accessed multiple times by multiple parties, including criminals who ultimately held the data for ransom.
The data was exposed by Spiral Toys, maker of the CloudPets line of stuffed animals. The toys record and play voice messages that can be sent over the Internet by parents and children. The MongoDB database of almost 2.2 million voice records was stored by a Romanian company called mReady, which Spiral Toys appears to have contracted with. Hunt said that, on at least four occasions, people attempted to notify the toy maker of the breach. In any event, evidence left behind by the ransom demanders made it almost certain company officials knew of the intrusions.