WA to receive half a million dollars as part of multistate settlement over 23andMe genetic data breach

A coalition of 42 attorneys general, including Washington Attorney General Nick Brown, today announced a settlement with the bankruptcy trustee for 23andMe, resolving allegations stemming from a 2023 data breach that compromised the genetic data of more than 220,000 customers in Washington state. 

Under the settlement, the states will receive $18 million from the bankruptcy funds, and Washington will receive $547,000, which will be used to enforce Washington’s consumer protection laws. 23andMe also agreed to a $46.8 million class-action settlement in the bankruptcy to provide relief to affected U.S. consumers who submitted claims by February 17, 2026. That claims process is now closed.

“23andMe presented itself as a safe steward of Washingtonians’ most sensitive personal data and then failed to ensure protection against hackers,” Brown said. “Companies that leave customers vulnerable to hackers will be held accountable in Washington.”

In October 2023, direct-to-consumer genetic testing company 23andMe announced that it had discovered a data breach in which 6.9 million consumers were affected, including 221,401 in Washington. This data breach exposed a wide range of data about 23andMe customers, including in some cases genetic ancestry information, and subsets of this data were subsequently published for sale on the dark web. 

23andMe learned about the breach months after impacted personal information was publicly available. 23andMe first denied a breach and then, once it confirmed the breach, blamed consumers for how their accounts were set up or how passwords were used. 23andMe initially accepted no responsibility for the breach, which was particularly egregious considering 23andMe’s partnership with MyHeritage, which itself was compromised years prior to the breach, exposing thousands of credentials shared between the websites. 

In the immediate aftermath of the data breach, the attorneys general formed a multistate investigation and found that 23andMe engaged in unreasonable data security practices, including, but not limited to: 

• Failing to employ safeguards against so-called credential stuffing attacks, including comparing passwords against blocklists of known breached passwords or requiring multifactor authentication; 
• Failing to implement appropriate rate limiting or intrusion prevention; 
• Failing to implement logging and monitoring or other tools likely to detect a data breach; 
• Failing to appropriately investigate and/or address unusual login patterns, including, for example, a massive spike in login attempts; 
• Failing to remediate known vulnerabilities; and
• Failing to properly review and test design features.

In March 2025, 23andMe filed for bankruptcy protection, and states subsequently filed claims related to the data breach investigation. As part of the bankruptcy proceedings, the assets—notably 23andMe’s consumer data—were sold to TTAM Research Institute, a non-profit formed by 23andMe founder and former CEO Anne Wojcicki. The terms of the sale included many information and data security requirements that likely would have been included in a settlement with 23andMe had it not filed for bankruptcy. Such terms included enhanced data security requirements, appropriate risk analysis, the addition of an advisory board, agreeing to be bound by comprehensive privacy laws without exception, and continuing to offer consumer deletion rights. These terms will make sure that TTAM Research Institute, now reregistered as 23andMe Research Institute, will be a safer custodian of genetic data moving forward.  

Brown joined the attorneys general of Alaska, Alabama, Arkansas, Arizona, Colorado, Connecticut, Delaware, the District of Columbia, Florida, Georgia, Idaho, Iowa, Illinois, Indiana, Kansas, Kentucky, Louisiana, Massachusetts, Maryland, Maine, Michigan, Minnesota, North Carolina, North Dakota, New Hampshire, New Jersey, New Mexico, New York, Ohio, Oklahoma, Oregon, Pennsylvania, South Carolina, South Dakota, Tennessee, Texas, Utah, Virginia, Vermont, Wisconsin, and West Virginia in today’s settlement. 

A copy of the settlement filing is available here. 

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