Lizzid people!!
Company “23 and me” hacked. DNA information on members and relatives released to web hackers
- Thread starter John Galt
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Lizzid people!!
I don't do my regular banking with Truist, only the estate account and that should be getting close to the point at which I can close it out (waiting on the IRS to process returns). Only reason I'm using Truist is that my dad's accounts were all at BB&T (which became Truist) so the easiest thing to do seemed to be to set up the estate account with the same bank. Not that I want to turn this into a rant about Truist, but they also charge $5 per copy of checks that they don't make available on the website (but the bank manager can print copies inside the bank).
Horrible bank.
I've looked on the Ancestry.com type webpages at my family tree. Very interesting. A lot of it is incorrect but there were reasons that people lied about things back then. Just like today. My family immigrated about 100 years ago to the USA. Good luck if my grandparents or aunts/uncles had any birth certificates. I don't think those thing existed in the old country at the turn of the century. One interesting family thing is my mother had two first cousins that were twins. Unidentical. They lived their whole lives together. One got married, had kids and was very nice. The other was a bit of a bitter spinster. However, on the immigration papers, the spinster one is listed as my grandfather's daughter and the other twin is not listed on the immigration papers. But who knows what ship they came over on and how that worked. I'm sure that the family names were Americanized at immigration.
I assume that the parents that raised me are my biological parents but I've never asked. I know the dates of my birth and my parents wedding don't quite add up with a 9 month delta. Lol.
I assume that the parents that raised me are my biological parents but I've never asked. I know the dates of my birth and my parents wedding don't quite add up with a 9 month delta. Lol.
Births, deaths, marriages in the old country were written in the local church log/records. Yes-many times birth records have been lost-but you would be surprised at whats still out there.
The two big data bases Ancestry and Family Search have a function where you can exchange messages . Then you can go from there.
Turns out the hack was on the customer side. Reporting per the WSJ
"...The DNA test-kit company on Monday reported a hacker accessed 14,000 accounts because of password reuse, exposing information belonging to approximately 6.9 million people. The 23andMe computer network wasn’t breached and wasn’t the source of these compromised credentials, a company spokesman said in a statement. The company first disclosed the incident in October and has been investigating since then.
The passwords used to break into these accounts had most likely been stolen from other websites. Because they were reused, they also worked on 23andMe, security experts say. The type of attack is known as credential stuffing, and it puts 23andMe in the company of other major businesses who have fallen victim to the cybercrime trend, including
It isn’t uncommon to see credential stuffing used to compromise thousands of accounts, but with 23andMe, the data in question is unusual, said Ryan McGeehan, owner of R10N Security, a cybersecurity consulting firm....
..Hackers have created a variety of automated tools to test stolen passwords against new websites. They then bundle the ones that work in databases that are sold on criminal forums. That has helped feed a jump in credential-stuffing attacks over the past few years. It has also pushed many companies into new authentication techniques such as passkeys—which ditch passwords entirely—and multifactor authentication, which requires extra identity confirmation before letting someone into an account..."
23andme has mandatory 2-factor authentication now. They email a 6-digit code to your email address.
An email address the affected customers probably use the same password for.
They required you to change the password for 23andme, so, if they were the same, no longer.
Birth certificates as we know them today weren't very common 150 years ago. However, for people who came from a culture or religion that practiced Baptisms of newborns, those records often still exist. I have photocopies of a few that date back to the late 1860's through about 1895 from tiny towns in Italy and Sicily. Those papers were accepted by the US immigration authorities during the great migration period of the 1880's through the 1920's.
Traders were putting their trade servers right on the same server rack in the same data center with the stock exchange's server just to get the least amount of latency possible to win a timing edge. They also use FPGA instead of software to get things done as fast as possible to win a timing edge. What do you expect they spend on security? lobbying? lawyers?
How much do you think you are willing to pay for your own medical record? What is the worst case damage a human life is worth and how much of actual financial loss is in medical record? We already banned insurance discrimination on this so there is not much loss there. A human life is only 4M max and I think a record breach is worth no more than a few hundred bucks in class action per patient.
Women lying about paternity is not a recent thing.
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Everything gets hacked eventually. South Carolina had their income tax records hacked in 2012.
"Using an email with a link encrypted with malware, cyber criminals made off with the income tax returns of 6.4 million South Carolina residents and businesses — exposing 3.6 million Social Security numbers, impacting more than three-quarters of the state’s population at the time — and 387,000 credit and debit card numbers."
www.postandcourier.com
"Using an email with a link encrypted with malware, cyber criminals made off with the income tax returns of 6.4 million South Carolina residents and businesses — exposing 3.6 million Social Security numbers, impacting more than three-quarters of the state’s population at the time — and 387,000 credit and debit card numbers."
SC's massive data breach 10 years later: Questions linger as investigation remains open
A decade after hackers made off with the income tax returns of 6.4 million South Carolina residents and businesses, an open federal investigation has left lingering questions.
The grand takeaway here is that someone clicked on that link. It's almost always people - rarely software itself - who are at the crux of these catastrophic failures. And Windows. :^)Everything gets hacked eventually. South Carolina had their income tax records hacked in 2012.
"Using an email with a link encrypted with malware, cyber criminals made off with the income tax returns of 6.4 million South Carolina residents and businesses — exposing 3.6 million Social Security numbers, impacting more than three-quarters of the state’s population at the time — and 387,000 credit and debit card numbers."
SC's massive data breach 10 years later: Questions linger as investigation remains open
A decade after hackers made off with the income tax returns of 6.4 million South Carolina residents and businesses, an open federal investigation has left lingering questions.
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Absolutely - but it likely wasn't someone who understood security that clicked the link, so why did such a person have access to the entire database. And why was the database not compartmentalized so one hack wouldn't give up the entire thing. I presume they learned much from that event, but you can't simply blame it on someone clicking a link - it was set up the wrong way to begin with.
"Someone clicked the link" was an example of why it is almost always *people*, not software. It is 100% someone who doesn't know a thing about "computers" who'd fall for the social engineering tactics of a sophisticated bad actor.
Your follow-up questions underscore that point. Why did Joan in HR who clicked on a link for a cheap cruise sent to her work email have access to [some given important piece of infrastructure]? Because some database or systems admin was inattentive. (That, too, is an example: I do not know anyone named Joan.)
I had them done there. I don't think I really care. CC I used is long expired.
In todays world no one should have ANY expectation for privacy..period
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