A 21-year-old man from the UK has been arrested in connection with the VTech hack that saw millions of customer details from around the world taken from the toy manufacturer.
Thames Valley Police has said the male from Berkshire, south east England, was arrested this morning as part of its investigation into "computer hacking offences".
Police from the South East Regional Organised Crime Unit took the man into custody and seized "electronic items" that will be looked at by its eForensics unit.
The Hong Kong based toy manufacturer had its servers compromised in mid-November but did not find out until journalists alerted it to the breach.
In the UK more than 727,000 profiles of children were accessed and 560,000 parent profiles were hit by the hack.
Included in the stolen data, the company confirmed, were names, addresses (digital and physical), passwords, secret answers, children's dates of birth and genders. There were also unconfirmed, but likely, reports of selfies and audio of children being taken from the company's servers.
VTech later confirmed that globally 4,854,209 parents' accounts and 6,368,509 children's profiles were compromised.
The arrest is the first in connection with the hack, but several data regulators around the wold, including in the UK, have said they are looking at the incident. "A 21-year-old man was arrested this morning in Bracknell on suspicion of unauthorised access to computer to facilitate the commission of an offence, contrary to section 2 of the Computer Misuse Act 1990 and suspicion of causing a computer to perform function to secure/enable unauthorised access to a program/data, contrary to section 1 of the Computer Misuse Act 1990," a statement from the police said.
This article was originally published by WIRED UK
