The Dropbox Breakin

Much is being made of the supposed Dropbox break in. Several users reported that they started receiving spam at email addresses that were only used with their Dropbox accounts. Dropbox, to their credit, immediately launched an investigation and brought in outside investigators to aid in their analysis.

The results of that investigation pretty much boil down to:

  • Most of the accounts were compromised because users had used the same passwords at other sites that were later compromised, and
  • A Dropbox employee, whose account was compromised in the same way, had stored an internal Dropbox document in the system that contained further email addresses.

The press, of course, was quick to compare this to the LinkedIn exploit that resulted from very poor security practices on LinkedIn’s part. But how, exactly, is Dropbox to blame for this? Yes, they have an employee who did an extremely stupid thing but how are they supposed to guard against users reusing their credentials? All in all, Dropbox was taking security seriously and doing everything right. They have since started offering optional two-factor authentication and a page that allows users to track logins to their accounts.

To my mind, the real blame belongs with the users who couldn’t be bothered to use unique passwords. This does include the Dropbox employee who, one hopes, had been admonished, terminated, or otherwise suffered the application of the clue bat. As I wrote recently, password reuse is endemic and those who are guilty of it deserve no sympathy when the real world exacts its revenge.

And, by the way, let me say again: if you store sensitive data in the cloud you better encrypt it. Dropbox is, of course, responsible for the action of their employees and one hopes that this incident will encourage them to make sure these employees aren’t doing things that endanger their customers. Still, the user is ultimately responsible for safeguarding their data. That means that they should assume that screw ups will happen and should therefore take actions to ensure they aren’t affected when they do.

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