23andMe tells victims it's their fault that their data was breached | TechCrunch
23andMe tells victims it's their fault that their data was breached | TechCrunch

23andMe tells victims it's their fault that their data was breached | TechCrunch

Hope this isn't a repeated submission. Funny how they're trying to deflect blame after they tried to change the EULA post breach.
I'm seeing so much FUD and misinformation being spread about this that I wonder what's the motivation behind the stories reporting this. These are as close to the facts as I can state from what I've read about the situation:
I agree with 23andMe. I don't see how it's their fault that users reused their passwords from other sites and didn't turn on Multi-Factor Authentication. In my opinion, they should have forced MFA for people but not doing so doesn't suddenly make them culpable for users' poor security practices.
I think most internet users are straight up smooth brained, i have to pull my wife's hair to get her to not use my first name twice and the year we were married as a password and even then I only succeed 30% of the time, and she had the nerve to bitch and moan when her Walmart account got hacked, she's just lucky she didn't have the cc attached to it.
And she makes 3 times as much as I do, there is no helping people.
These people remind me of my old roommate who "just wanted to live in a neighborhood where you don't have to lock your doors."
We lived kind of in the fucking woods outside of town, and some of our nearest neighbors had a fucking meth lab on their property.
I literally told him you can't fucking will that want into reality, man.
You can't just choose to leave your doors unlocked hoping that this will turn out to be that neighborhood.
I eventually moved the fuck out because I can't deal with that kind of hippie dippie bullshit. Life isn't fucking The Secret.
Lately I try to get people to use Chrome's built-it password manager. It's simple and it works across platforms.
people
I agree, by all accounts 23andMe didn't do anything wrong, however could they have done more?
For example the 14,000 compromised accounts.
In hindsight some of these questions might be easier to answer. It's possible a company with even better security could have detected and shutdown these compromised accounts before they collected the data of millions of accounts. It's also possible they did everything right.
A full investigation makes sense.
I already said they could have done more. They could have forced MFA.
All the other bullet points were already addressed: they used a botnet that, combined with the "last login location" allowed them to use endpoints from the same country (and possibly even city) that matched that location over the course of several months. So, to put it simply - no, no, no, maybe but no way to tell, maybe but no way to tell.
A full investigation makes sense but the OP is about 23andMe's statement that the crux is users reusing passwords and not enabling MFA and they're right about that. They could have done more but, even then, there's no guarantee that someone with the right username/password combo could be detected.
Those are my questions, too. It boggles my mind that so many accounts didn’t seem to raise a red flag. Did 23&Me have any sort of suspicious behavior detection?
And how did those breached accounts access that much data without it being observed as an obvious pattern?
Common thing, a lot of people despise MFA. I somewhat recently talked with 1 person who works in IT (programmer) that has not set up MFA for their personal mail account.
Credential stuffing is an attack which is well known and that organizations like 23andme definitely should have in their threat model. There are mitigations, such as preventing compromised credentials to be used at registration, protecting from bots (as imperfect as it is), enforcing MFA etc.
This is their breach indeed.
They did. They had MFA available and these users chose not to enable it. Every 23andMe account is prompted to set up MFA when they start. If people chose not to enable it and then someone gets access to their username and password, that is not 23andMe's fault.
Also, how do you go about "preventing compromised credentials" if you don't know that the credentials are compromised ahead of time? The dataset in question was never publicly shared. It was being sold privately.
Is there a standards body web developers should rely on, which suggests requiring MFA for every account? OWASP, for example, only recommends requiring it for administrative users, but for giving regular users the option without requiring it.
There’s some positives to requiring MFA for all users, but like any decision there’s trade offs. How can we throw 23andme under the bus when they were compliant with industry best practices?
I agree. The people blaming the website are ridiculous here.
It’s just odd that people get such big hate boners from ignorance. Everything I’m reading about this is telling me that 23andMe should have enabled forced MFA before this happened rather than after, which I agree with, but that doesn’t mean this result is entirely their fault either. People need to take some personal responsibility sometimes with their own personal info.
Laziness alone is a pretty big reason. MFA was available and users were prompted to set it up. The fact that they didn’t should tell you something.
Step 4 is where 23andme got hacked
By your logic I hack into every site I use by … checks notes presenting the correct username and password.
Would bet that you’re a crypto fan.
How much we talking? I’ll take that bet.
Would bet your password includes "password" or something anyone could guess in 10 minutes after viewing your Facebook profile.
Edit: Your l33t hacker name is your mother's maiden name and the last four of your social, bro. Mines hunter1337, what's yours?
Why?