As noted in an update to my first post, Salted Hash learned that this incident potentially impacted over 186,000 children under the age of 18. Here is Sanrio’s statement from their SanrioTown web site:

Sanrio Digital notifies that personal information belonging to members of the consumer website SanrioTown.com was publicly accessible owing to a security vulnerability. The vulnerability has been corrected and investigations are underway. To our knowledge at this time, no personal information of SanrioTown.com users was stolen or exposed.

On December 19, it was revealed by security researcher Chris Vickery that personal information (such as names, date of birth, gender) belonging to SanrioTown.com members was accessible by someone who knew the IP addresses of specific vulnerable servers.

The vulnerable data did not include credit card information or other payment information. Users’ passwords were accessible but remained securely encrypted with the cryptographic hash function SHA-1.

Please note that membership data of SanrioTown is not shared with other Sanrio services or websites (such as Sanrio.com), therefore other Sanrio services were not affected by this security vulnerability.

We investigated the problem and applied fixes, including securing the servers identified as vulnerable by Mr Vickery.

We are conducting an internal investigation and security review into this incident; at this time we have no indication that users’ personal information was stolen by malicious parties.

We apologize deeply for any concern and inconvenience this incident may have caused.

Detailed Information 

1. Personal user information that may have been accessible: 

           First and last name

           Birthday (encoded)

           Gender

           Country

           Email address

           Password (encrypted using SHA-1 hashes)

           Password hint questions

1. Number of people whose personal information may have been leaked 

           Up to 3.3 million website members were potentially affected by this security vulnerability, however we have no indication that any user data was actually exposed or utilized by malicious parties.

1. Circumstances 

           Owing to server misconfiguration, some personal information of SanrioTown.com members was visible to security researcher Mr Chris Vickery.

1. Response going forward 

           We are requesting SanrioTown users to change their passwords on SanrioTown as well as passwords on other online services and accounts if they used similar passwords or hint questions.

1. Measures to prevent recurrence 

           We installed additional security mechanisms on our servers.  We will carry out periodic review of these security measures

1. Inquiries 

           General inquiries:

           Please contact Sanrio Digital at [email protected]

           Media inquiries only:

           Mark Leeper (on behalf of Sanrio Digital)

           Managing Director

           Matrix Communications Limited

           email: [email protected]

           Tel: +852 9142-1510