Genealogy website 23andMe is one of the latest companies to suffer a data hack.
Judy Russell at The Legal Genealogist has sent out a timely reminder about the importance of being security conscious after the breach was reported to users of the website.
So far, personal information about roughly a million users has been offered for sale on the so-called Dark Web. The data offered included full names, birth years, location information and more. As yet it is unknown exactly how many accounts were accessed or how much data was harvested, but currently there is no indication that any raw DNA data was hacked. The incident is still under investigation.
The success of this breach highlights the danger of using the same password across multiple websites. The story is that hackers collected passwords associated with specific email addresses that had already been hacked at other sites and then reused them at 23andMe to see if they worked. For many, they did.
So if, like me, you are guilty of sometimes using a generic password on different websites, it is time to have a think about changing habits and updating your passwords.
Read Judy's full blog post, Judy G. Russell, “Change your password!,” The Legal Genealogist
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