The Vtech Breach: Protecting your kids from tchotchkes

December 7, 2015 John Obeto

Is it worth it?

That’s the first question I ask myself every time after I or my Wifey acquire a toy or whatnot for any of our kids that require the input of several pieces of PIIs in order to either activate it, or use their online component.

100% of the time, I use a completely bogus series of info, and I NEVER use any product that requires a credit card.

Nothing they offer – NOTHING – is worth registering for. I have already paid for the toy/tchotchke. Go away.

Wifey, on the other hand, sets the kids’ joy before potential ID theft. To her credit, she tends to use one-time prepaid cards, or a PayPal account set up just for that.

I will assume here that my siblings and my immediate family do heed the warnings I have thrown out over the years.

I remember vigorously shaking my head, and screaming “Nyet! Nyet!” quite loudly at the suggestion that we connect one of My Princess’s Barbie Dolls to the Internet not too long ago.

This past week/weekend, a breach on the networks of a toy manufacturer exposing several million children to identity theft landed with the force of a high-yield thermonuclear device!

I had barely begun to bask in the glow of my “I told you so!” declarations when this fiasco hit.

I’ll take a double bow right about now.

The Vtech Breach
According to reports, the personal information of more than 6 million kids was stolen from Vtech. Most of them from the Kidizoom smartwatch or the VTech InnoTab tablets.

How, you might ask, could this happen?

Well, purchasers of Vtech’s Android tablets, smartwatches, and cameras were prompter, and in most cases, offered dangling carrots of updates, games, books and other content if they gave their kid’s names, social security numbers, addresses and birth dates.

All that info for what? A mere piffle?

I wasn’t aware that milking children’s information could be lucrative to criminals.

In fact, according to Tom Kellermann, chief cybersecurity officer with Trend Micro, children offer credit slates to fraudsters that can be exploited for years without the victim’s knowledge. As a result, a child’s name, birth date, email address and Social Security number are worth $30 to $40 on some underground markets, more than the $20 value of most adult profiles.

That’s not all.

A report from CMU showed that a 2011 research study determined that more than 10 percent of a sample of stolen children’s social security numbers had some sort of fraudulent activity associated with them, a proportion 51 times higher than adults’.

Protect your kids, folks!

Is it worth it?

Heck, NO!