this post was submitted on 03 Jan 2024
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23andMe tells victims it's their fault that their data was breached | TechCrunch (techcrunch.com)
submitted 10 months ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]
279 comments fedilink hide all child comments
 

Hope this isn't a repeated submission. Funny how they're trying to deflect blame after they tried to change the EULA post breach.

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[–] [email protected] 218 points 10 months ago (52 children)

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:

  1. 23andMe was not hacked or breached.
  2. Another site (as of yet undisclosed) was breached and a database of usernames, passwords/hashes, last known login location, personal info, and recent IP addresses was accessed and downloaded by an attacker.
  3. The attacker took the database dump to the dark web and attempted to sell the leaked info.
  4. Another attacker purchased the data and began testing the logins on 23andMe using a botnet that used the username/passwords retrieved and used the last known location to use nodes that were close to those locations.
  5. All compromised accounts did not have MFA enabled.
  6. Data that was available to compromised accounts such as data sharing that was opted-into was available to the people that compromised them as well.
  7. No data that wasn't opted into was shared.
  8. 23andMe now requires MFA on all accounts (started once they were notified of a potential issue).

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.

[–] [email protected] 9 points 10 months ago (13 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 10 months ago (1 children)

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?

[–] [email protected] 1 points 10 months ago

I don't think it's possible to make a blanket statement in this sense. For example, Lemmy doesn't handle as sensitive data as 23andMe. In this case, it might be totally acceptable to have the feature, but not requiring it. Banks (at least in Europe) never let you login with just username and password. The definitely comply with different standards and in general, it is well understood that the sensitivity of the data (and actions) needs to be reflected into more severe controls against attacks which are relevant.

For a company with so sensitive data (such as 23andMe), their security model should have definitely included credential stuffing attacks, and therefore they should have implemented the measures that are recommended against this attack. Quoting from OWASP:

Multi-factor authentication (MFA) is by far the best defense against the majority of password-related attacks, including credential stuffing and password spraying, with analysis by Microsoft suggesting that it would have stopped 99.9% of account compromises. As such, it should be implemented wherever possible; however, depending on the audience of the application, it may not be practical or feasible to enforce the use of MFA.

In other words, unless 23andMe had specific reasons not to implement such control, they should have. If they simply chose to do so (because security is an afterthought, because that would have meant losing a few customers, etc.), it's their fault for not building a security posture appropriate for the risk they are subject to, and therefore they are responsible for it.

Obviously not every service should be worried about credential stuffing, therefore OWASP can't say "every account needs to have MFA". It is the responsibility of each organization (and their security department) to do the job of identifying the threats they are exposed to.

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