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Comment by toomuchtodo | Hacker News Reader

If you’re not providing secure MFA as an option and invalidating breached credential pairs via HIBP, you’re negligent as an idp. 23andme failed hard, and they should own it.

FFS, default to magic link login via email if you have to. At least then you're relying on Google, Apple, or someone else for auth (in most cases of unsophisticated users).

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It is an option. Every user has the option to setup MFA when they set up their account. The fact that people reused their passwords and chose not to setup MFA is not 23andme’s fault.

As a 23andme user who has filed a complaint with the FTC, purposely opted out of arbitration and intending to join a class action, and is responsible for customer IAM at a fintech, I politely disagree. Poor IAM and AAA decisions are a choice, and there must be consequences for resulting harm.

Lol, enjoy your $20 because someone reused their password.

I don't care about the money, let the lawyers and regulators extract. That is the incentive mechanism.

Unfortunately the majority of people aren't very tech literate. We have to remember HN is far from average. The company I work for forces MFA and I think if you have sensitive data like this, yes, you should force MFA. Truth be told, it's not going to enter the public lexicon until some big players start forcing adoption. Rule of thumb: if my grandma wouldn't know to do it, I shouldn't expect my users to do it. If you expect your users to use bad practices, then you're not doing your job well. Idk if we should say it's somebody's fault when that somebody is a non-expert and is making a reasonable choice.

But they did provide secure MFA as an option, and it seems the credential pairs hadn't shown up in HIBP because they had been privately purchased via the hack of a different site. The logins were even using locations that matched previous ones.

So how did 23andme fail so hard here? Literally nothing you've suggested would have prevented this.

> But they did provide secure MFA as an option

> So how did 23andme fail so hard here? Literally nothing you've suggested would have prevented this.

They made MFA mandatory after getting popped, at the same time they changed their Terms of Service to attempt to evade liability. Why did they wait to get popped? Either negligence or an active decision was made to avoid support costs and engineering time for mandatory MFA was made. Also, a magic link I suggested would've solved for this, unless attackers were going to get into everyone's inbox with leaked creds to get the link to login and get that session token. Definitely more effort than credential spraying 23andme login endpoints.

https://techcrunch.com/2023/11/07/23andme-ancestry-myheritag...

https://blog.23andme.com/articles/enhanced-customer-security...

A magic link is just a form of 2FA. And the reason not to make 2FA mandatory isn't about engineering costs -- they'd already built it. It's because a lot of users don't like it. I personally despise sites that require a magic link rather than a password, because it takes me 30s to log in instead of 1s.

There are lots of commenters here on HN in this story saying they don't think sites should make 2FA mandatory. There are lots of usability problems with 2FA as well -- if you lose a device or when traveling.

You're basically saying that sites that allow you to log in with just a password, if you choose, shouldn't be allowed to exist. That seems unreasonable to me.

> You're basically saying that sites that allow you to log in with just a password, if you choose, shouldn't be allowed to exist. That seems unreasonable to me.

I'm saying sites that host information of value, such as genetic information, should not be allowed to support login with just a password. That seems reasonable to me, and a regulatory gap to be closed. If you don't want to use MFA or other secure auth systems on Reddit or Twitter, by all means, I'd agree that secure auth for low value systems might be overly burdensome to a user population. There are well worn paths if you lose MFA (remote identity proofing, mailing an OTP to known addresses, dinging a credit card $1, etc) that are all reasonable and affordable to implement.

Is your argument that the data 23andme hosts is not of value or sensitive and it should not matter if their security story is lacking ("just passwords are fine, yolo")?

EDIT: I think we fundamentally disagree on the issue.

> such as genetic information, should not be allowed to support login with just a password. That seems reasonable to me

But that isn't obviously reasonable to me, that we need a law for that.

What if I don't think a bunch of estimates based on a bunch of my gene readings is all that valuable? Why not let me choose to use just a password?

But if I do think it's super valuable, then I can use 2FA. (And also obviously choose not to share any of my information with anyone else on the site.)

Why should it be the government's job to remove that choice from me?

How about a middle ground, where if I set up MFA on my account, I automatically disable the access from "distant relative" who haven't setup MFA, even if I want to share my data with them. Because fundamentally this incident is not serious if such transitive access was not employed in the first place.

And since this is a specific access pattern for 23andme, I agree we shouldn't involve government here.

Do you think google is deactivating people based on HIBP? If not why do you think everyone else should?

Google defaults to Passkeys now [1], and has very aggressive heuristics around logging in [2]. They also maintain their own version of HIBP internally [3], and will force a password change [4] under certain circumstances.

They are doing this because when they have high assurance of your identity (and your account hasn't been taken over), that is the best time to issue the cryptographic credential (the Passkey) which improves go forward security of the account. Over time, accounts should filter over to Passkeys, and at some point, they will likely deprecate passwords (or require high confidence you are you to login with just username and password, vs a Passkey). I've had a discussion with someone on the project at Google, and they could only say "stay tuned" about what comes next. To be clear, I'm not divulging anything beyond what Google made public in their blog post and a bit of speculation on my part.

> Do you think google is deactivating people based on HIBP? If not why do you think everyone else should?

TLDR "password resets and account lockouts vs deactivating users" and "because it is good practice to protect your users and their data from compromise"

[1] https://blog.google/technology/safety-security/passkeys-defa...

[2] https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...

[3] https://security.googleblog.com/2019/12/better-password-prot...

[4] https://support.google.com/accounts/answer/98564?hl=en ("If there’s suspicious activity in your Google Account or we detect that your password has been stolen, we may ask you to change your password. By changing your password, you help make sure that only you can use your account.")

I just created a new gmail account to test this - it asked me to create a password (minimum 8 characters, I used lowercase letters and numbers only) and didn't say anything about MFA or passkeys. I'm not going to fact check every other claim since the first one failed so utterly.

> This means the next time you sign in to your account, you’ll start seeing prompts to create and use passkeys, simplifying your future sign-ins. It also means you’ll see the “Skip password when possible” option toggled on in your Google Account settings.

Did you even look at their provided links? You took the time to create a new account, why not actually look at the provided links to see what is being claimed in the first place?

I read the link - I don't think "we will hassle people about this eventually but not even give them the option at signup" is the traditional definition of "default" though. Do you?

Prompting on first sign in is pretty “default” to me.

I highly doubt you read the link, otherwise you wouldn’t have gone through the whole sign up process just to prove something isn’t a “default” according to you. You’d have just referenced the article and made the exact same point.

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