7,000,000 Dropbox accounts hacked … or not – The Digital

New began circulating on the night of Monday to Tuesday: 7000000 Dropbox accounts were hacked, and associated identifiers for sale. The pirates, however, have not quite played fair: not only do these data are not derived from the online storage service, but they are far above all provide access to private files of someone <. / strong>
The case started on Pastebin, where 400 pairs of identifiers (email + password) were posted in the clear. The author of the publication stated then that this was a small sample of the spoils from a major hacking made against Dropbox servers. A quick test users interested sowed doubt: some pairs worked, others did not. The author, for his part, did not want to reveal more, except for a fee, and only in virtual currency.

Dropbox, however, quickly responded and indicated that the source was in no way servers . According to the online storage service, the proposed IDs were stolen from other services, while the functional pairs are simply the result of bad habits of Internet users, and often use the same password for multiple services. After verification of couples address and password available, the firm would even so: very few accounts would be affected, while suspicious activity would result in an automatic reset password. Not to worry, in short.

Of course, this is the story on the service in question, it is important for it to appear reassuring. It can not be, however, that advise caution. If you’re one of the – many – users who recycle their abundantly (s) word (s) password, a reset of the sesame will not perhaps unnecessary, while enabling two-factor authentication will not fail make life much more difficult for an intruder.

Note, however, that if the files are gone, it is not necessarily a hacker. Dropbox has indeed release this weekend about a different problem: the former clients of software malfunction restarts said client when certain parameters are applied selectively sync. As a result, in some cases, data is lost. This bug should however be solved by a simple update.