mardi 28 février 2017

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The Scary Reason Parents May Want to Take Away This Popular Children's Toy

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If your child owns a CloudPet, you may want to think twice before letting them continue using it. The company that produces the internet-connected stuffed animals has exposed the personal information of more than 800,000 customers and nearly 2 million voice recordings from its users - most of whom are children.

These toys can record and send voice recordings via a phone app. So if a parent or relative is traveling out of town, they can record a voice message on their phone and send it to their child's CloudPet to keep in touch, and vice versa.

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It may sound pretty harmless on the surface, but online security expert Troy Hunt is on a mission to prove otherwise for the sake of unaware parents. Hunt noticed that since at least Christmas Day of 2016, information on the CloudPet's server, such as login information and voice recordings, was stored in a database that could be easily accessed by anyone on the internet.

Hunt found some CloudPet users to help him experiment with the issue, and he was able to locate some pretty personal info on the servers, from the children's names to their relationship with the user they were sending messages to. On top of that, the recorded audio clips were also available on the server.

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He wrote on his blog about one specific instance in which uncovered information from a user who gave him permission to do some digging on the server. "One little girl who sounded about the same age as my own 4-year-old daughter left a message to her parents: Hello mommy and daddy, I love you so much," he described on his blog.

It also looks like hackers can push messages to the stuffed animals, as one user just proved. Twitter user MisterZoomer shared the video below to show how his child's CloudPet recently received a concerning voice recording.

Hunt is advising parents to be more aware of the potential danger behind these toys. "Parents need to work on the assumption that if they have a CloudPet, multiple unauthorized parties could have accessed their voice recordings," he told The Huffington Post. "Because the service is still online today and account details were also leaked, those recordings could still potentially be accessed today."



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