Snapchat, Gmail, eBay, iCloud, Playstation Network and countless others have all fallen victim to the efforts of hackers pilfering account information and releasing it for fun and/or profit.
Now we’ve got another chapter in the seemingly endless list of things being broken into for the sake of being broken into. Online storage and data transferring facility Dropbox is the latest service to suffer an apparent major security breach, with hackers claiming to have the emails and passwords of somewhere in the vicinity of 7 million Dropbox accounts.
The anonymous hacker boasted of the breach on Pastebin – with links later posted to Reddit – releasing “teasers” containing emails and passwords, and promising to post more if users “donated” enough Bitcoin for their efforts.
Unfortunately in this case it seems that Dropbox is already one step ahead of the curve. The service is claiming that the passwords are all already old and expired, and were sourced from previous information leaks and attacks on other services – i.e. Where people once had the same login details for multiple services.
“These usernames and passwords were unfortunately stolen from other services and used in attempts to log in to Dropbox accounts. We’d previously detected these attacks and the vast majority of the passwords have been expired for some time now.“
Nevertheless, Dropbox has since disabled the new batch of leaked passwords, and is encouraging users to switch to two-factor authentication.
So now the question remains not so much “who’s next?” but more “honestly, who cares?” Whereas once it might have been considered a badge of honour or something significant, nowadays it’s really more of a mild annoyance to some and a complete non-event to others. If someone is that desperate to get at the boring work .pdfs or the one obscenely crappy comedy sketch about a mild-mannered University lecturer named “Professor Penis” who just can’t stop making accidental dick jokes, then by all means have at it.
Other than that, I dunno. It’s just… There’s probably better way better ways to pass the time.
via SMH.
