From these 14,000 initial victims, however, the hackers were able to then access the personal data of the other 6.9 million million victims because they had opted-in to 23andMe’s DNA Relatives feature.
How exactly are these 6.9M users at fault? They opted in to a feature of the platform that had nothing to do with their passwords.
On top of that, the company should have enforced strong passwords and forced 2FA for all accounts.
What they're doing is victim blaming.
users knowingly opted into a feature that had a clear privacy risk.
Strong passwords often aren't at issue, password re-use is. If un-{salted, hashed} passwords were compromised in a previous breach, then it doesn’t matter how strong those passwords are.
Every user who was compromised:
Put their DNA profile online
Opted to share their information in some way
A further subset of users failed to use a unique and strong password.
A 2FA token (think Matrix) might have helped here, other than that, individuals need to take a greater responsibility for personal privacy. This isn’t an essential service like water, banking, electricity etc. This is a place to upload your DNA profile…
As I said elsewhere, the company implemented this feature and apparently did not do absolutely jack about the increased risk of account compromise deriving from it.
If I would sit in a meeting discussing this feature I would immediately say that accounts which share data with others are way too sensitive and at least these should have 2fa enforced. If you don't want it, you don't share data. Probably the company does not have a good security culture and this was not done.
users knowingly opted into a feature that had a clear privacy risk.
Your aunt who still insists she's part Cherokee is not as capable of understanding data security risks as the IT department of the multi-million dollar that offered the ludicrously stupid feature in the first place.
People use these sites once right? Who's changing their password on a site they don't log into anymore? Given that credential stuffing was inevitable and foreseeable, the feature is obviously a massive risk that shouldn't have been launched.
Your direct account was accessed or some of your information was access through a compromised account? those are big differences and from what I've read only the latter should have been possible. and in my opinion, not such a big deal.
I don't know title etiquette in this forum. I used the author's title because it is their article, not mine, and thus their opinion/research/AI output.
Yeah, 23AndMe has some culpability here, but the lions share is still in the users themselves
Tell me you didn't read the article without telling me.
If 14,000 users who didn't change a password on a single use website they probably only ever logged into twice gives you 6.9 million user's personal info, that's the company's fault.
You didn't read it either. They gained access to shared information between the accounts because both accounts had enabled "share my info with my relatives" option.
Logging into someones Facebook and seeing their friends and all the stuff they posted as "friends only" and their private DM discussions isn't a hack or a vulnerability, it's how the website works.
It doesn't matter. It is a known attack and the company should have implemented measures against it.
At the very least, they should have made a threat modeling exercise and concluded that with this sharing feature, the compromise of a single account can lead to compromise of data for other users. One possible conclusion is that users who shared data should be forced to have 2fa.
It doesn't matter. It is a known attack and the company should have implemented measures against it.
At the very least, they should have made a threat modeling exercise and concluded that with this sharing feature, the compromise of a single account can lead to compromise of data for other users. One possible conclusion is that users who shared data should be forced to have 2fa.
Laughing a feature that lets an inevitable attack access 500 other people's info for every comprimised account is a glaring security failure.
Accounting for foreseeable risks to users' data is the company's responsibility and they launched a feature that made a massive breach inevitable. It's not the users' fault for opting in to a feature that obviously should never have been launched.