Extra particulars are rising a few data breach the genetic testing company 23andMe first reported in October. However as the corporate shares extra data, the state of affairs is changing into even murkier and creating higher uncertainty for customers trying to know the fallout.
23andMe stated in the beginning of October that attackers had infiltrated a few of its customers’ accounts and piggybacked off of this entry to scrape private information from a bigger subset of customers by the corporate’s opt-in, social sharing service often known as DNA Family. On the time, the corporate did not point out what number of customers had been impacted, however hackers had already begun promoting information on prison boards that appeared to be taken from at the least 1,000,000 23andMe customers, if no more. In a US Securities and Alternate Fee filing on Friday, the corporate stated that “the menace actor was in a position to entry a really small proportion (0.1 %) of consumer accounts,” or roughly 14,000 given the corporate’s recent estimate that it has greater than 14 million prospects.
Fourteen thousand is lots of people in itself, however the quantity did not account for the customers impacted by the attacker’s data-scraping from DNA Family. The SEC submitting merely famous that the incident additionally concerned “a big variety of information containing profile details about different customers’ ancestry.”
On Monday, 23andMe confirmed to TechCrunch that the attackers collected the non-public information of about 5.5 million individuals who had opted in to DNA Family, in addition to data from a further 1.4 million DNA Family customers who “had their Household Tree profile data accessed.” 23andMe subsequently shared this expanded data with WIRED as properly.
From the group of 5.5 million individuals, hackers stole show names, most up-to-date login, relationship labels, predicted relationships, and proportion of DNA shared with DNA Family matches. In some circumstances, this group additionally had different information compromised, together with ancestry experiences and particulars about the place on their chromosomes they and their kinfolk had matching DNA, self-reported areas, ancestor start areas, household names, profile footage, start years, hyperlinks to self-created household timber, and different profile data. The smaller (however nonetheless huge) subset of 1.4 million impacted DNA Family customers particularly had show names and relationship labels stolen and, in some circumstances, additionally had start years and self-reported location information affected.
Requested why this expanded data wasn’t within the SEC submitting, 23andMe spokesperson Katie Watson tells WIRED that “we’re solely elaborating on the data included within the SEC submitting by offering extra particular numbers.”