If you’re a Dropbox user since the year 2012, we’re sure you recently might have received a communication from the company asking you to reset your password for the platform. This is because the company discovered a file a few weeks back containing passwords of some 68 million of its users that were that were obtained in a security breach sometime ago.
According to information made available by Motherboard, Dropbox’s systems were hacked back in the year 2012, and the hackers were successfully in getting away with 68 million Dropbox usernames and passwords.
If you’re one of those Dropbox users who hadn’t changed their passwords since the mid of 2012, don’t you worry. Dropbox has forced each of the user of those accounts to reset the passwords to their account. Hence, the file with the old passwords, in possession of the hackers would be of no use anymore. Further, the company has found that the password of some 32 million Dropbox accounts have been aggressively hashed using bcrypt, while the remaining have seen the usage of a slightly weaker SHA-1 algorithm. In addition to this, an effort has been made to obscure the passwords as they have also been salted. For the unaware, salted in this context means the passwords have been appended with a random string of characters.
If you’re one of those who uses the same email id and password for all their online accounts, we would recommend you to change all of them to different characters immediately. It is a common occurrence that the hackers try to use the passwords and usernames obtained through the security breach of one company on other platforms also.
If you’re constantly worried about the safety and privacy of data of your online account, we recommend you to avail the services of a password manager and enable a two-factor authentication on every service that offers it, right away.
Better safe than sorry!