Office of the
Illinois Attorney General
Kwame Raoul

Chicago — Attorney General Kwame Raoul announced a bipartisan, multistate settlement with the bankruptcy trustee for 23andMe, resolving allegations stemming from a 2023 data breach that compromised the genetic data of 6.9 million customers worldwide. The settlement includes $150 million in allowed claims for states. However, due to the finite amount of funds in the bankruptcy estate and numerous other claims, the court limited recovery to $18 million, which will be paid out of available bankruptcy funds immediately. Of the $18 million, Illinois will receive more than $500,000. 23andMe also agreed to a $46.75 million class-action settlement in the bankruptcy to provide relief to affected U.S. consumers who submitted claims by Feb. 17, 2026.

“The 23andMe data breach compromised the personal data, and in some cases genetic information, of thousands of Illinoisans,” Raoul said. “This settlement sends the message that companies, particularly those collecting sensitive information from their customers, must have robust protections to keep consumers’ personal data secured.”

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 nearly 200,000 in Illinois. 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 stolen 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 credential stuffing breach. This type of breach occurs when hackers use stolen credentials from one system in an automated attack to try to breach another system. 23andMe’s initial lack of accountability for the breach was particularly egregious considering the company’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, Raoul and a coalition of attorneys general launched a multistate investigation and found that 23andMe engaged in unreasonable data security practices, including, but not limited to:

• Failing to employ safeguards against 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.
• 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 nonprofit 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 registered as 23andMe Research Institute, will be a safer custodian of genetic data moving forward.   

Attorney General Raoul was joined in the settlement by the attorneys general of Alaska, Alabama, Arkansas, Arizona, Colorado, Connecticut, Delaware, the District of Columbia, Florida, Georgia, Idaho, Iowa, 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, Washington, Wisconsin and West Virginia.