Internet-Connected Teddy Bears Don’t Keep Secrets

A high-tech toy teddy bear exposed more than 2 million voice messages from children and parents by using poor security practices, according to a security researcher.

Spiral Toys’ CloudPets brand of internet toys reads like a list of security don’ts. The company stored customer credentials in a publicly available online database that didn’t require a password and wasn’t behind a firewall while it put audio messages in an Amazon-hosted service that didn’t require authorization, according to a Feb. 27 blog by Troy Hunt, who maintains Have I Been Pwned? breach notification service.

The company hashed customers’ credentials, but it didn’t establish any password strength requirements so capable hackers would be able to crack large chunks of the more than 800,000 credentials, Hunt wrote. Some passwords, for example, were a single letter or commonly used passwords like “password,” “123456” and “cloudpets.”

The data was exposed from Christmas to sometime in January and Motherboard reports it was also accessed and held for ransom multiple times in a wave of attacks on MongoDB databases.

Hunt says the company was alerted several times about the breach, but never responded. Mark Myers, Spiral Toys CEO, told Network World no voice recordings were stolen.

“Circling back to the parents' position for a moment, you must assume data like this will end up in other peoples' [sic] hands,” Hunt wrote. “Whether it's the Cayla doll, the Barbie, the VTech tablets or the CloudPets, assume breach. It only takes one little mistake on behalf of the data custodian—such as misconfiguring the database security—and every single piece of data they hold on you and your family can be in the public domain in mere minutes.”