Security Advisor
Dropbox Has Been Hacked... Again
Change your passwords!
When the cloud-based storage service was compromised in June of 2011, the company said that they would install measures to make sure this wouldn't happen again.
Well, that guarantee lasted exactly one year.
Last month users of the popular Dropbox started receiving a ton of spam messages, which caused the company to investigate the matter. Turns out a hacker was able to gain access to an employee Dropbox account, which contained an e-mail list of other users. And the kicker was that some passwords were also attached.
While you can read the whole story here, the news coming out as of this afternoon is that the company only took measures (notified and resetted the passwords of affected users) listed by an online leak.
This fact angered the blood of one Rob Sobers, technical marketing manager, at security firm Varonis: "What did they base [the number of possible victims] on? The list of hashes that were published BY THE HACKERS? Is it beyond the realm of possibility that the attacks might not have published the whole list? They’re HACKERS!"
You know Rob's mad by his use of capped words. And he's right to be mad. Never go off the information of a two-bit hacker.
So if you own a Dropbox account and you don't want it to send a ton of spam messages on your behalf, take two seconds and change your password.
And, honestly, if you read another Dropbox incident like this in the next 12 months, just go ahead and switch your cloud storage provider as well.