(Legal Newsline) – Louisiana Attorney General Liz Murrill’s office has a 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.
Louisiana was part of a coalition of 42 state attorneys general in the settlement in which 23andMe agreed to a $46.75 million class-action settlement in the bankruptcy to provide relief to affected U.S. consumers who submitted claims by February 17, 2026.
The settlement also includes $150 million in allowed claims for states. Due to the finite amount of funds in the bankruptcy estate and numerous other claims, recovery is limited to $18 million, which will be paid out of available bankruptcy funds immediately. Louisiana will receive $258,668.
“Louisianans should never have to worry that their personal information and genetic data will be exposed because a company failed to protect it,” Murrill said. “Companies that collect and profit from sensitive personal information have a responsibility to safeguard that data. And when they fail, they will be held accountable.”
In October 2023, 23andMe announced that it had discovered a data breach in which 6.9 million consumers were affected, including 68,814 in Louisiana. This data breach exposed a wide range of data about its 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.
The company initially accepted no responsibility for the credential stuffing 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 AGs formed 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; 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.
The AGs say 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.
Murrill joined the attorneys general of Alaska, Alabama, Arkansas, Arizona, Colorado, Connecticut, Delaware, the District of Columbia, Florida, Georgia, Idaho, Iowa, Illinois, Indiana, Kansas, Kentucky, 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 in the settlement.
