News this morning that 68 million user’s information has been leaked from an attack on Dropbox, with email addresses and passwords being leaked on to the internet, has left people reeling about their data security online.
News this morning that 68 million user’s information has been leaked from an attack on Dropbox, with email addresses and passwords being leaked on to the internet, has left people reeling about their data security online.
The breach
The hack took place in 2012, and at the time Dropbox reported a collection of user’s email addresses had been stolen, failing to mention that passwords had been stolen as well.
The original breach was apparently the result of the reuse of a password a Dropbox employee had previously used on LinkedIn, which suffered a breach that revealed the password and allowed the hackers to enter Dropbox’s corporate network. From there they gained access to the user database with passwords that were encrypted and “salted” – the practice of adding a random string of characters during encryption to make it even harder to decrypt.
Threats to online data means that files may get leaked, lost, damaged or corrupted during a system crash, or by accidentally deleting or overwriting files. Information may also get attacked by computer viruses, hacked into by unauthorised users, destroyed by natural disasters, acts of terrorism or war, or deleted or altered by employees.
Data security
Keeping data secure can be done in many ways. By making regular backups of files, protecting yourself against viruses using anti-virus software and using a system or password so that access to data is restricted, you know you are safe and who has access to your files.
Saving important data on removable hard drives and avoiding accidental deletion of files by write-protecting disks will ensure you have a back up if anything does go wrong. Alternatively, you can also use data encryption techniques to code data so that it makes no sense to people without the right training!
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.
According to the Office for National Statistics, 1 in 10 adults were a victim of cybercrime last year. More than 5.8 million incidents of cybercrime were recorded in 2015, meaning that the crime rate in England and Wales has almost doubled.
What we recommend
We would highly recommend that you change your password for Dropbox if you have an account. The government has pledged £1.9 billion to target cybersecurity and cybercrime over the next 5 years. At HeX Productions, we regularly back up all our websites to ensure that as little data is possible is lost. Using WordPress, we are able to set restrictions to control different levels of access for certain users, making admins and editors work within set limits.
Source: https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2016/aug/31/dropbox-hack-passwords-68m-data-breach
