Technology

58303 readers

11 users here now

This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.

Our Rules

Follow the lemmy.world rules.
Only tech related content.
Be excellent to each another!
Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
Politics threads may be removed.
No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
Only approved bots from the list below, to ask if your bot can be added please contact us.
Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed

Approved Bots

founded 1 year ago

MODERATORS

[email protected]

827

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]

271 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.

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments

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

In reality, yes. If the data breach because users were reusing passwords, then they are partially at fault. If someone gets rear ended by a drunk driver and their injuries could have been limited by by wearing a seatbelt, then yes. They are partially at fault for it. People who don't wear their seatbelts are the same types that reuse passwords. They don't think it will happen to them and take their luck up to that point for granted.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 10 months ago* (last edited 10 months ago)

Even if they are partially at fault, the company tends to have more power to fix security problems than the customer does. That's why we tend to put the onus on the company to fix these issues. It's not really fair to put it on either one for something criminals did, but at least the company has more power to control things.

In the case of credit cards, the US industry has implemented PCI compliance to force a level of security on all the individual companies. Now, I happen to think PCI is a flawed approach. Payment gateways in most other countries work something like PayPal or Google Wallet, where only the processing company ever sees payment data. The merchant only sees that the payment is verified and has the correct amount. However, US internet sites evolved where each individual merchant has to hold on to credit card data, and that necessitates PCI. Fortunately, PCI compliance is such a PITA that many companies are turning to payment gateways like everywhere else in the world.

In the case of 23andme, they had a few broken passwords that then affected half their customer base through the relationship feature. Aside from dropping relationships, they also could have used MFA methods. My Steam account uses MFA, and it's far less important than my DNA information.