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DNA database 23andMe admits 6.9m users hacked [1]

['Rob Beschizza']

Date: 2023-12-06  

Nearly 7 million of the people who gave their DNA to 23andMe to learn questionably-accurate things about their ethnic origins are now owned by hackers. Though the actual DNA profiles were not taken, swiped data includes family relationships, birth years and geographic locations—sufficiently revealing for there to be lists of people with Jewish ancestry circulating online allegedly based on the hack.

As was first reported by Tech Crunch, the company has acknowledged that by accessing those accounts, hackers were then able to find their way into "a significant number of files containing profile information about other users' ancestry". The criminals downloaded not just the data from those accounts but the private information of all other users they had links to across the sprawling family trees on the website.The stolen data includes information like names, how each person is linked and in some cases birth years, locations, pictures, addresses and the percentage of DNA shared with relatives.

You can change your password, but you can't change the banding pattern in your spit.

Oh look, they just changed their terms of service 6 days ago to make everyone agree to arbitration.

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[1] Url: https://boingboing.net/2023/12/06/dna-database-23andme-admits-6-9m-user-profiles-hacked.html

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