14 DAY TRIAL // British police have announced the arrest of a 21-year-old man in connection with the VTech data breach, where 4.8 million parent records and 6.7 million kid accounts were stolen after a cyber-attack.
The South East Regional Organised Crime Unit (SEROCU) arrested the yet unnamed man at his home in the town of Bracknell, in Berkshire, England, on Tuesday morning.
Bracknell, a town west of London, is known to be the home of many UK-based tech startups, and has a strong tech scene, with many programmers and coders living in the area.
Besides the arrest, police officers also seized computers from the man's home for further forensic analysis.
This is the first arrest made in the VTech data breach that took place around November 14 but was only reported two weeks later.
Data for 6.7 million kids was stolen, not 200,000
During the incident, an unknown attacker managed to pierce the poor VTech defenses and take large amounts of information about parents and their kids.
VTech is a popular toy maker that creates educational and learning toys for kids around the world. VTech is based in China.
In the initial report, investigators said that only 200,000 kid accounts were compromised. This proved to be false, and after further analysis, this number increased to 6.7 million after a few days.
Data stolen in the incident includes real names, emails, home addresses, login credentials, family trees, kid images, children names, children genders, and many other more.
"We are still at the early stages of the investigation and there is still much work to be done. We will continue to work closely with our partners to identify those who commit offences and hold them to account," said Craig Jones, Head of the Cyber Crime Unit at SEROCU. "Cyber crime is an issue which has no boundaries and affects people on a local, regional and global level."