23andMe says non-public consumer information is up on the market after being scraped

Enlarge / The 23andMe brand displayed on a smartphone display screen.

Genetic profiling service 23andMe has confirmed that non-public consumer information is circulating on the market on-line after being scraped off its web site.

Friday’s affirmation comes 5 days after an unknown entity took to a web-based crime discussion board to promote the sale of personal info for tens of millions of 23andMe customers. The discussion board posts claimed that the stolen information included origin estimation, phenotype, well being info, photographs, and identification information. The posts claimed that 23andMe’s CEO was conscious the corporate had been “hacked” two months earlier and by no means revealed the incident.

23andMe officers on Friday confirmed that non-public information for a few of its customers is, in actual fact, up on the market. The reason for the leak, the officers mentioned, is information scraping, a way that basically reassembles massive quantities of knowledge by systematically extracting smaller quantities of knowledge accessible to particular person customers of a service. Attackers gained unauthorized entry to the person 23andMe accounts, all of which had been configured by the consumer to choose in to a DNA relative characteristic that enables them to search out potential relations.