Lizzid people!!
Wow. OK I will admit I put too much into your statement about no idea how it happened! You are just seeing this now as well? They never told you obviously. Total hassle, but you should change
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.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.
The two big data bases Ancestry and Family Search have a function where you can exchange messages . Then you can go from there.I hear what your saying. I knew someone who was adopted. He went looking for his birth mother and she was looking for him too. It was a big happy reunion apparently. Not sure what data source he used. Perhaps this service mentioned would work?
From a CNN report via. Securities filing so this press release essentially comes direct from the company:
A Friday filing from 23andMe to the Securities and Exchange Commission said that about 0.1% of the company’s user accounts, or roughly 14,000, had their accounts breached by the hackers.
23andMe is standing by that number but is also now (12/5/23) telling reporters that the hackers were able to access some 5.5 million profiles that use a company feature called DNA Relatives that allows users to find genetic relatives. In addition, the hackers accessed a subset of family tree information on 1.4 million DNA Relatives profiles, the 23andMe spokesperson said in an emailed statement.
This reinforces my fear of these DNA testing companies and the data they possess. I know of a family that did this as a Holiday gift, a bit of a lark gift and lo and behold, it came back that one of the four kids was not from the father. And no, it was not an adoption, you can fill in what happened 20+ years ago….
How do you recover from that, both the kid and the family unit?
Has anyone here done DNA testing and had an unexpected finding from the results or perhaps, because of the information in the database, been contacted by someone claiming to be related.
My opinion - this DNA technology has the potential for so much good for diagnosis of medical conditions. It should have been developed. BUT the results should be be treated like medical records and kept secure.
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.
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?1) Many people really don't have the truth on their ancestry. Grandma can have it wrong - told wrong, etc.
2) The accuracy on 23me is not perfect (sometimes dubious) , based on regional haplo-grouping but gets better with data/time
3) It really angers me that medical companies have so many data breaches. It's not a theory that some hackers do this for pride or vengeance, but money IS involved. Think ransom as just a forward way, or worse long term use of data.
4) It's interesting. Medical, credit unions, stores seem to be agencies that are hacked which directly impact my life. With wife and kids, I think I can count 4 maybe 5 hacked medical institutions alone. What is curious, why not more hacks of financial institutions, banks, brokerages? They must have some serious protection. Not a theory, just thinking out loud. Not political, not lewd, not religion.
Women lying about paternity is not a recent thing.About 20 years ago a woman came forward with a story that she had been adopted, later found out who her real mother was but the mother wouldn't reveal who her father was. Her mother made a deathbed confession and named my dad as her father. My dad died when I was a child so he wasn't around to defend himself and my siblings and I tried to make sure my mom didn't get a hint of the story before she passed away.
Fast forward to a few years ago. The woman did a DNA test on one of the popular websites and not only found out who her real father was, but found a couple of siblings from her real mom and real dad, and another one from her real mom and another guy.
It was a relief for my siblings and I but still raised the question as to why her mom named my dad as the father. We'll never know but at least the DNA test proved she wasn't our half sister.
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.www.postandcourier.com
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.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. :^)
"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.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.