For the past few years, TechCrunch has looked back at some of the worst, badly handled data breaches and security incidents in the hope — maybe! — other corporate giants would take heed and avoid making some of the same calamities of yesteryear.
To absolutely nobody’s surprise, here we are again this year listing much of the same bad behavior from an entirely new class of companies — plus, some bonus (dis)honorable mentions from the year that you might’ve missed.
23andMe blamed users for its massive data breach
Last year, genetic testing giant 23andMe lost the genetic and ancestry data on close to 7 million customers, thanks to a data breach that saw hackers brute-force access to thousands of accounts to scrape data on millions more. 23andMe belatedly rolled out multi-factor authentication, a security feature that could have prevented the account hacks.
Within days of the new year, 23andMe took to deflecting the blame for the massive data theft onto the victims, claiming that its users did not sufficiently secure their accounts. Lawyers representing the group of hundreds of 23andMe users who sued the company following the hack said the finger-pointing was “nonsensical.” U.K. and Canadian authorities soon after announced a joint investigation into 23andMe’s data breach last year.
23andMe later in the year laid off 40% of its staff as the beleaguered company faces an uncertain financial future — as does the company’s vast bank of its customers’ genetic data.
Change Healthcare took months to confirm hackers stole most of America’s health data
Change Healthcare is a healthcare tech company few had heard about until this February when a cyberattack forced the company to shut down its entire network, prompting immediate and widespread outages across the United States and grinding much of the U.S. healthcare system to a halt. Change, owned by health insurance giant UnitedHealth Group, handles billing and insurance for thousands of healthcare providers and medical practices across the U.S., processing somewhere between one-third and
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