The information is now for sale in database trading communities, and a Dropbox employee confirmed to Motherboard that the data is legitimate.
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Motherboard reported the data dump earlier today, after it was highlighted by security service Leakbase, with operator of Have I been pwned, Troy Hunt, independently verifying the news.
Therefore, if you have received an email from Dropbox prompting you to change your password, do so immediately as you are under a risk of having fallen victim to hackers during the security breach of 2012. The actual theft occurred in 2012, but it was only recently that Dropbox forced a mass password reset to protect its users from unauthorized attempts to access their accounts.
Heim also reminded users that they should think about whether they reused their Dropbox passwords in other accounts.
Dropbox has been sending notifications to all its users forcing them to reset passwords if their accounts are dated prior to mid-2012.
It was in a later statement that Dropbox clarified: “We can confirm that based on our intelligence number we have seen is in the 60+ mil range”.
What the company didn’t realise at the time, though, was that user passwords were also stolen, the Guardian reports. “We’re sorry about this, and have put additional controls in place to help make sure it doesn’t happen again”, the company said at the time.
The files contain the email addresses and passwords of customers for the storage and sharing site from mid-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.
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Hackers stole account details of more than 68 million Dropbox users in a 2012 breach. He called the hashing algorithm that protected the passwords very resilient and said “all but the worst possible password choices are going to remain secure even with the breach now out in the public”. We proactively initiated this password update prompt for Dropbox users who meet certain criteria.
