Dropbox Hires Outside Team To Investigate Possible Security Breach And Spam Attacks

Dropbox is hiring an outside team of experts to investigate a possible security breach that has been sending targeted spam to email addresses associated with users’ Dropbox accounts.

Earlier in the week, reports CNN, Dropbox began an investigation into a possible security leak after European users of the cloud service began complaining in the Dropbox Forum of receiving spam targeted specifically to their email account that was associated with their Dropbox account. Many users are even stating the email account being spammed was only set up for the creation of their Dropbox account.

Many users also had wondered whether an hour-long outage Tuesday was related to the problem. But a forum post by Joe G. states the outage “was incidental and not caused by any external factor or third-party.” In the same post by Joe G., the company also stated they were still investigating the issue at hand and were even bringing in an outside team of experts to “leave no stone unturned.”

NBC reports a representative of Dropbox wanted to emphasize that they “had not detected any evidence of private files being accessed”. The representative, however, declined to speculate further on the extent or possible nature of the leak.

Here is the post on the Forum by a representative of the company:

The spam emails, at least some of which are scams masquerading as messages from European gambling sites, mainly seem to be focused on European users of the service as there have been no reports from users outside Europe receiving this email targeted spam. As a precautionary step Dropbox users worldwide are being urged to change their password or associated email.

Just over a year ago, Dropbox suffered from a “minor glitch” caused by errors in a code update that allowed people to use any password they wanted to access any Dropbox user’s account. The glitch lasted roughly 4 hours and the company states it has not had any further issues of that nature.