Editor’s note: This article was first published in June 2011, as news from that week: its references to this morning (the Dropbox incident) and Sunday afternoon (the Netflix outage) refer to that time.
The well-known Dropbox (a free cloud data storage service) this morning allowed any user, for 4 hours, to get into anyone else’s account. Dropbox’s motto is security, so the debate over the safety of our data in the cloud has opened up again.
According to Dropbox itself, it was all due to a maintenance task that was supposed to take less than 5 minutes, as it only involved changing part of the program’s code. Apparently, once the change was made, the password check stopped working, so simply entering an email address brought up the stored data of the user that address belonged to.
Remember that millions of people now use cloud storage services. Some keep Excel spreadsheets with banking details there, others their company’s accounts, and some all kinds of confidential data, so during those 4 hours it was completely exposed.
Although the company has also said that not all accounts were exposed, since not all users have the account administrator service, TechCrunch isn’t fully convinced by its answer.
What is clear is that, once again, private data has been compromised despite the supposed security that protects us online.
Meanwhile, on Sunday afternoon, Netflix (the online film rental service) was also down for more than 5 hours, and it still hasn’t confirmed whether this was due to a surge of users, a temporary maintenance problem or a hacker attack.
Featured image: Carl Lender from Sunrise, USA, CC BY 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons.
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