Hackers Snatched Over 60 Million Passwords From Dropbox’s Leaky Servers
More details about a previously disclosed security breach at cloud storage provider Dropbox have come to light. The hack itself is old news—it occurred back in 2012—but what's new is how many users were affected by it. Hackers made off with details belonging to north of 68 million Dropbox users, prompting a mass password reset.
The folks at Motherboard got their mitts on a sample of files containing email addresses and hashed passwords of users affected by the Dropbox hack. The information is contained in four files totaling about 5GB, with details of 68,680,741 accounts. Apparently a senior Dropbox employee confirmed with the site that the info is real.
It's a bit sobering to see so many accounts affected, and it sheds light on a recent email from Dropbox prompting users to change their passwords if they haven't done so since mid-2012.
"We’re reaching out to let you know that if you haven’t updated your Dropbox password since mid-2012, you’ll be prompted to update it the next time you sign in. This is purely a preventative measure, and we’re sorry for the inconvenience," Dropbox stated in its email.
Dropbox provided a link to a webpage with more information about the warning, on which it explains that it learned about an old set of Dropbox user credentials being compromised in 2012. The service also explained that it doesn't believe any affected accounts have been improperly accessed, but still recommended taking the precautionary measure of changing passwords.
Thumbnail Image Source: Flickr (DROPBOX IN 30 MINUTES)
The folks at Motherboard got their mitts on a sample of files containing email addresses and hashed passwords of users affected by the Dropbox hack. The information is contained in four files totaling about 5GB, with details of 68,680,741 accounts. Apparently a senior Dropbox employee confirmed with the site that the info is real.
It's a bit sobering to see so many accounts affected, and it sheds light on a recent email from Dropbox prompting users to change their passwords if they haven't done so since mid-2012.
"We’re reaching out to let you know that if you haven’t updated your Dropbox password since mid-2012, you’ll be prompted to update it the next time you sign in. This is purely a preventative measure, and we’re sorry for the inconvenience," Dropbox stated in its email.
Dropbox provided a link to a webpage with more information about the warning, on which it explains that it learned about an old set of Dropbox user credentials being compromised in 2012. The service also explained that it doesn't believe any affected accounts have been improperly accessed, but still recommended taking the precautionary measure of changing passwords.
Thumbnail Image Source: Flickr (DROPBOX IN 30 MINUTES)
