The Drum Awards for Marketing - Extended Deadline

-d -h -min -sec

Dropbox

Dropbox denies that a hacker is leaking data from 7m stolen accounts

Author

By John McCarthy, Opinion Editor

October 14, 2014 | 3 min read

Dropbox has denied accusations that an anonymous hacker has access to, and is leaking, over seven million Dropbox accounts.

Dropbox has denied its database has been compromised

The Next Web first noticed the claims on Paste Bin where a user posted 400 accounts and passwords, asking for Bitcoin donations to continue the leaking the data allegedy gathered in a "massive hack of 7,000,000 Dropbox accounts".

The threat emerged during a poor week for Dropbox, which started with Edward Snowden condemning the service for not encrypting user files as they are uploaded to the cloud.

The cloud service issued a statement denying that it was hacked: “Recent news articles claiming that Dropbox was hacked aren’t true. Your stuff is safe.

“The usernames and passwords referenced in these articles were stolen from unrelated services, not Dropbox. Attackers then used these stolen credentials to try to log in to sites across the internet, including Dropbox but we have measures in place to detect suspicious login activity and we automatically reset passwords when it happens.”

It added: “Attacks like these are one of the reasons why we strongly encourage users not to reuse passwords across services.”

Dropbox said it offers users extra security through a two-step verification process, to protect the service from third party exploitation hacks - a flaw which caused a leak of Snapchat images at the weekend, and the iCloud 'Fappening' celebrity leak in August.

The threat emerged after the firm on Monday apologised for a flaw that caused the deletion of entire backed-up folders on the cloud service.

Dropbox

Content created with:

Dropbox

Find out more

More from Dropbox

View all

Trending

Industry insights

View all
Add your own content +