Dropbox has had a Potential Breach of Security

Dropbox seems to have quickly become everyone’s first choice when it comes to cloud based storage software. While it reports that it has somewhere in the range of 50 million users who are using the service daily and those users upload over 1 billion files every 48 hours. So the question has always been in peoples minds….”How safe and reliable is this cloud computing stuff we use every day ?”

While it’s not confirmed that there’s been an actual security breach quite yet, Dropbox has officially stated that it’s doing some heavy investigation in to what could possible be a breach of security into their system. They have even made it public knowledge that they have brought in a “team of experts” from outside the company to help them so that they “leave no stone unturned.”

It seems that word started surfacing Monday on the Dropbox forums from many users of the service that they were getting flooded with emails to the email account in which they have connected to the cloud service. The emails were appearing to be coming from European gambling sites. It also seems that most of the users complaining were located in Europe as well.

Dropbox had an hour-long outage on Tuesday which they have reported as saying ”was incidental and not caused by any external factor or third party.” Users who were receiving the email spam were questioning if this outage has/had anything to do with them now receiving all of this spam that they are suddenly seeing flow into their inbox’s.

Below is a direct quote from Joe G., an actual Dropbox employee who posted on the forums about 24 hours ago with the following message:

We wanted to update everyone about spam being sent to email addresses associated with some Dropbox accounts. We continue to investigate and our security team is working hard on this. We’ve also brought in a team of outside experts to make sure we leave no stone unturned.

While we haven’t had any reports of unauthorized activity on Dropbox accounts, we’ve taken a number of precautionary steps and continue to work around the clock to make sure your information is safe. We’ll continue to provide updates.

We also want to let you know that the dropbox.com site outage this afternoon (from 12:35 to 12:55 PDT) was incidental and not caused by any external factor or third party.

Joe

Please don’t let us forget that it was just about a year ago that Dropbox had updated some code incorrectly that allowed every user to enter “whatever password they wanted” to log into their accounts. The issue was present for about 4 hours before they caught it and got it fixed. With that in the back of everyone’s mind, it’s no surprise that customers/users are wondering what’s going on this time around.

We strongly suggest that you immediately log into your Dropbox account and change your password at this time just to be a little extra cautious. As stated above, there’s no solid confirmation yet of a security breach in their system, and hopefully we’ll report soon that it wasn’t a security breach and all of those faithful users will have nothing to worry about. However, I’ve already changed my Dropbox password and recommend that you go and do the same. Don’t forget to log out of your Dropbox app on all of your devices and then log back in so that you will be forced to enter the new password. Just another little extra step of security that helps keep things safe and sound.

Source: CNN