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Ignacio Cofone, Associate professor, Law, McGill University

The 23andMe data breach reveals the vulnerabilities of our interconnected data

23andMe Google Economy
Users' genetic information was accessed during a hacker attack on the 23andMe's user databases. (Shutterstock)

On Oct. 6, news broke that 23andMe, the Google-owned company that collects genetic material from thousands of people for ancestry and genetic predisposition tests, had a massive data breach.

But as it turns out, the company’s servers were not hacked. Rather, hackers targeted hundreds of individual user accounts — allegedly those that had weak or repeated passwords. After gaining access to the accounts, hackers could leverage the “DNA relatives matches” function of 23andMe to get information about thousands of people who didn’t use the service.

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