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this post was submitted on 03 Jan 2024
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I'm honestly asking what the impact to the users is from this breach. Wasn't 23andMe already free to selling or distribute this data to anybody they wanted to, without notifying the users?
That's not how this works. They are running internationally, and GDPR would hit them like a brick if they did that.
I would assume they had some deals with law enforcement to transmit data one narrow circumstances.
Well if you signed up there and did an ancestry inquiry, those hackers can now without a doubt link you to your ancestry. They might be able to doxx famous people and in the wrong hands this could lead to stalking, and even more dangerous situations. Basically everyone who is signed up there has lost their privacy and has their sensitive data at the mercy of a criminal.
This is different. This is a breach and if you have a company taking care of such sensitive data, it's your job to do the best you can to protect it. If they really do blame this on the users, they are in for a class action and hefty fine from the EU, especially now that they've established even more guidelines towards companies regarding the maintenance of sensitive data. This will hurt on some regard.
It's not that they said:
What they said was (paraphrasing):
Which, honestly?
Completely valid. The only way to stop this would be for 23andme to monitor these "hack lists" and notify any email that also has an account on their website.
Side note:
Any tech company can provide info if asked by the police. The good ones require a warrant first, but as data owners they can provide it without a warrant.
That's not 23 and me fault at all then. Basically boils down to password reuse. All i would say is they should have provided 2fa if they didn't.
A seasoned internet user has a password manager.
Not using one is your negligence, no one else's.
One password to break them all, and in the dark web bind them.
The sad thing is you have to balance the costs of requiring your customer to use 2FA with the risk of losing business because of it and the risk of losing reputation because your customers got hacked and suffered loss.
The sad thing is some (actuall most) people are brain dead, you will lose business if you make them use a complicated password or MFA and it puts them in the position to make a hard call.
They took the easy route and gave the customer the option to use MfA if they wished and unfortunately a lot of people declined. Those people should not have the ability to claim damages (or vote, for that matter)
I feel like that argument could be made for some things, but inherently cannot apply to companies involved in personal, genetic, or financial information.
Unfortunately, from the information that I've seen, the hack lists didn't have these credentials. HIBP is the most popular one and it's claimed that the database used for these wasn't posted publicly but was instead sold on the dark web. I'm sure there's some overlap with previous lists if people used the same passwords but the specific dataset in this case wasn't made public like others.
The stolen info was used to databases of people with jewish ancestry that were sold on the dark web. I think there was a list of similar DB of people with chinese ancestry. 23andme's poor security practices have directly helped violent white supremecists find targets.
If you're so incompetent that you can't stop white supremecists from getting identifiable information about people from minorities, there is a compelling public interest for your company to be shut down.
That is a whoooolllee lot of assumptions
Why do you think someone would buy illegally obtained lists of people with Jewish or Chinese ancestry? And who do you think would be buying it?
Scammers, that opens up a lot of scam potential.
Hi, I’m your new cousin.
Scammers would buy all info, not specifically targeted to people of Jewish or Chinese descent. That’s not what’s being sold.
Who do you think would want only information about people with Jewish or Chinese ancestry, and why?
OK you’re gonna have to give me a link to what you’re talking about. It feels like you are being specific, and I am being generic.
It’s the same incident, the OP article just didn’t mention it.
In this case, I think it is more likely to be some type of Arab major nation, for the Jewish one, and I don’t know about the Chinese.
What I do know is there pretty much every white supremacists I have known has been one of the white supremacist stereotypes to a T.
Anything higher level than that it’s just conspiracy theory level on my part at least with that one information point.
Complacency is dangerous, especially when white nationalist groups are rallying and preparing for violence with militias.
I would guess (hope?) that the data sets they sell are somewhat anonymized, like listing people by an i.d. number instead of the person's name, and not including contact information like home address and telephone number. If so then the datasets sold to companies don't contain the personal information that hackers got in this security breach.