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Gedmatch confirms data breach after users' DNA profile data made available to police – TechCrunch:
Gedmatch, the DNA analysis site that police used to catch the so-called Golden State Killer, was pulled briefly offline on Sunday while its parent company investigated how its users' DNA profile data apparently became available to law enforcement searches.
[...] In a statement on Wednesday, the company told users by email that it was hit by two security breaches on July 19 and July 20.
"We became aware of the situation a short time later and immediately took the site down. As a result of the breach, all user permissions were reset, making all profiles visible to all users," the email read. "This was the case for approximately 3 hours. During this time, users who did not opt-in for law enforcement matching were also available for law enforcement matching, and conversely, all law enforcement profiles were made visible to Gedmatch users."
The statement said that the second breach caused user's settings to reset, allowing law enforcement to search profile data for users who had previously opted out.
At the time of writing, Gedmatch's website was offline.
(Score: 4, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Friday July 24 2020, @10:55PM (1 child)
It sounds like the second breach was created deliberately in order to allow the government to carry out DNA searches which the government had pre-positioned itself to carry out as soon as the security was breached, or did I read that wrong?
If the government is just going to come in and steal stuff with their secret government hacker tools and then deny they know anything about what just happened we may as well tear civilization down and start all over.
~childo
(Score: 1, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Friday July 24 2020, @11:32PM
But the police *really* wanted to look at that data to help them with a bunch of unsolved cases involving child pornographers and child killers.