Breach date: 2015-11-13. Added to this index: 2015-11-25. Accounts affected: about 4.8M. Domain: vtechda.com.
What happened
In November 2015, hackers extracted more than 4.8 million parents' and 227k children's accounts from VTech's Learning Lodge website. The Hong Kong company produces learning products for children including software sold via the compromised website. The data breach exposed extensive personal details including home addresses, security questions and answers and passwords stored as weak MD5 hashes. Furthermore, children's details including names, ages, genders and associations to their parents' records were also exposed.
Breach data sourced from Have I Been Pwned, used under CC BY 4.0. Additional breach metadata provided by XposedOrNot. DataExposed is an independent service and is not affiliated with or endorsed by either.
What was exposed
Dates of birth: Your full birth date, day, month and year, collected at signup for age checks, identity verification, insurance quotes, birthday offers or government services.
Email addresses: The email address you used to register or log in. It is the most common field in breaches because it doubles as your username on most sites.
Family members' names: Names of your partner, children, parents, siblings or other relatives, stored as emergency contacts, beneficiaries, household members, family tree entries or authorised users on an account.
Genders: The gender or sex recorded on your profile, usually picked from a list at signup, sometimes with a title such as Mr or Ms or a gender identity option beyond male and female.
IP addresses: The network addresses your devices used when you signed up, logged in or posted, recorded by almost every website in its access logs.
Names: Your first name, surname and sometimes middle name or initials, as you gave them when you signed up. It appears in almost every breach because nearly every account asks for it.
Passwords: The secret you use to sign in, stored by the breached service either in plain text, in a scrambled form called a hash, or encrypted. How it was stored decides how quickly it can be recovered.
Physical addresses: Your residential, postal, billing or delivery address, stored by retailers, utilities, banks, government services and almost any company that sends you something.
Security questions and answers: The questions and answers used to verify you during password resets or phone support, such as your first pet, first school, favourite teacher or mother's maiden name.
Usernames: The handle or login name you chose for an account, which may be public on forums, games and social platforms or used privately to sign in.
Website activity: Records of your actions on a website or app, such as pages viewed, searches, clicks, downloads, logins, cart activity, IP addresses and timestamps.
What to do now
Check whether your own address is in this dataset with the free email breach check.
Change the password on this service and every other site where you used the same password.
Turn on two-factor authentication on your email account first, because it is the reset path for everything else.
Treat calls and messages that quote real details about you as hostile until you verify them another way.
Frequently asked questions
What data was leaked in the VTech breach?
The VTech breach exposed Dates of birth, Email addresses, Family members' names, Genders, IP addresses, Names, Passwords, Physical addresses, Security questions and answers, Usernames, Website activity. About 4.8M accounts were affected.
Was I affected by the VTech breach?
Run the free email breach check with the address you used on that service. It will tell you whether your address appears in this dataset.
What should I do about the VTech breach?
Change the password on that account and everywhere you reused it, then turn on two-factor authentication. Passwords from this breach are traded and tried automatically against other sites.