Dropbox Hacked – 68 Million User Accounts Compromised

So was Dropbox Hacked? There was some rumours going around last week after it sent out a password reset e-mail warning to all users. It seems like it’s limited to users who were active in 2012 and the only ones who would be in trouble are as usual, those who haven’t changed their password since 2012 and those who re-use passwords across multiple sites.

I’d hope those 2 parameters exclude everyone reading this site. Plus the passwords weren’t leaked in plain text, they were hashed (some in bcyrpt and some in SHA) and the SHA hashes are salted.

A data dump purported to contain 60 million Dropbox user IDs is the real thing, with the company confirming it to The Register, and independent verification from security researcher Troy Hunt.
However, apart from the existence of a file with user IDs and hashed passwords, the company believes nothing has changed since last week.
A spokesperson told The Register “We are confident that this is not a new incident; this data is from 2012, and these credentials were covered by the password reset”.
We’re also told there was no new breach of Dropbox systems.

It seems strange as well after a massive leak of LinkedIn credentials this year, also from 2012 – following that now we have this. Also 4 years later, and also a HUGE cache of details.
Coincidence? Maybe, perhaps the same perpetrators, but I don’t know there would be any reason or value generation from releasing these 4 year old dumps of credentials.

The Register’s conversation with Hunt – operator of HaveIBeenPwned and security educator – bears that out to a degree, since while Hunt has identified his pre-2012 user ID in the list, the author’s post-2012 account is not in the 60 million records.
Hunt is currently preparing the data to load into HaveIBeenPwned, but believes it’s unlikely that anyone’s going to recover passwords anytime soon.
Testing his own password against the bcrypt hash demonstrates the file is real, Hunt said, although a definitive date is hard to prove.
The four files Hunt obtained extract to a bit more than 4.7 GB, he said, and while there’s 2.21 GB of SHA hashes, even those might pose a problem for an attacker, since they’re salted – the attacker would need the salts to decrypt the hashes.

The files have been validated as real, as the company themselves have confirmed it – and it’s been independently validated by security researchers.
I’m not sure if any real harm is going to come from this, or it’s just another flash in the pan. I’d be more interested in reading a forensic analysis of how the intruders got hold of the credentials.
But as we know, that kind of stuff is NEVER forthcoming.
You can search for your own e-mail address here to see if any of your accounts have been leaked – https://haveibeenpwned.com/