Sex toy maker Tenga says hacker stole customer information | TechCrunch

Sex toy maker Tenga notified customers of the data breach on Friday, according to an email obtained by TechCrunch.

In the report, the Japanese company said that “an unauthorized party gained access to the professional email account of one of our employees,” which allowed the hacker to access the contents of the employee’s email inbox. This access potentially allowed the hacker to see and steal customer names, email addresses and historical email correspondence “which may include order details or customer service inquiries”.

The hacker also sends spam emails to the hacked employee’s contacts, including customers, according to the email sent to the customers.

Tenga did not respond to a request for comment and to provide additional information, such as the total number of affected customers. The company says on its website that it has shipped more than 162 million products worldwide.

Order data and customer service inquiries are likely to contain intimate information that many customers may not wish to disclose due to the nature of the products in question.

The company advised customers to change their passwords, though it did not say that customers’ passwords had been compromised, and to be wary of suspicious emails, especially those coming from a specific employee whose account appeared to have been compromised.

Tenga said it took several measures after the breach, including resetting the hacked employee’s credentials and enabling a basic security feature called multi-factor authentication that “in our systems” prevents access to accounts with stolen passwords. The company did not respond when asked if there was any multifactor on the email account prior to this breach.

Tenga was founded in 2005 in Japan and is headquartered in Tokyo. Tenga sells a variety of sex toys, mostly for men. It is unclear whether the breach affected customers outside the United States, given that the email specifically came from the Tenga Store USA.

Tenga is the latest in a long list of sex toy makers like Lovesense last year and adult sites like Pornhub last year and SexPanther in 2020 to be hacked.