NEW YORK—Your smartphone or tablet is most likely pretty secure — not perfect, maybe, but generally unlikely to be hacked or to store, say, your email where other people could read it.
The same can’t be said for any Internet-connected toys you may have purchased for your kids. Recently discovered security flaws in a pair of such toys highlight just how badly the toy industry has neglected such problems, theoretically exposing kids to online threats.
While major crimes teeming from the hack of a connected toy haven’t yet surfaced, some experts argue that it’s only a matter of time.
Kids “aren’t expected to be Internet security experts and neither are their parents,” said Tod Beardsley, security research manager for Rapid7 Inc., the Boston-based cybersecurity firm that published the toy-security research on Tuesday.
