The hack highlights the need for tight security, both at the user end – the use of strong passwords, two-step authentication and no reuse of passwords – and for the companies storing user data. From there they gained access to the user database with passwords that were encrypted and “salted” – the latter a practice of adding a random string of characters during encryption to make it even harder to decrypt.ĭropbox reset a number of users’ passwords at the time, but the company has not said precisely how many. The original breach appears to be the result of the reuse of a password a Dropbox employee had previously used on LinkedIn, the professional social network that suffered a breach that revealed the password and allowed the hackers to enter Dropbox’s corporate network. “Definitely still change your password if you’re in any doubt whatsoever and make sure you enable Dropbox’s two-step verification while you’re there if it’s not on already.” “The bcrypt hashing algorithm protecting is very resilient to cracking and frankly, all but the worst possible password choices are going to remain secure even with the breach now out in the public,” said Hunt.
Half the passwords were still encrypted with SHA1 at the time of the theft. At the time Dropbox practiced good user data security practice, encrypting the passwords and appears to have been in the process of upgrading the encryption from the SHA1 standard to a more secure standard called bcrypt. The company had around 100m customers at the time, meaning the data dump represents over two-thirds of its user accounts. Hunt said: “There is no doubt whatsoever that the data breach contains legitimate Dropbox passwords, you simply can’t fabricate this sort of thing.”ĭropbox sent out notifications last week to all users who had not changed their passwords since 2012. The independent security researcher and operator of the Have I been pwned? data leak database, Troy Hunt, verified the data discovering both his account details and that of his wife. The dump of passwords came to light when the database was picked up by security notification service Leakbase, which sent it to Motherboard.
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