You know the general public is suffering from security fatigue when something as big as the Dropbox breach appears in the news, and almost as quickly, disappears. In case you blinked, online magazine Vice.com broke the news last week that a database recently surfaced which contains over 60 million Dropbox.com user accounts (email addresses) and hashed passwords. Almost immediately following this news, Dropbox itself issued an email warning to its users that it was resetting passwords of users who might have been impacted by a 2012 breach. Breach notification site HaveIBeenPwned.com also corroborated the reports that the account information found in the database does contain valid usernames and encrypted passwords.
What this means for you:
Even though breach data may be years old it can still be valuable, especially if the passwords are stored with weak, easy-to-crack encryption. In the case of the Dropbox breach, approximately half of the passwords are strongly encrypted, and are unlikely to be decoded, and the other half stored in a slightly weaker, but still formidable encryption method. As proof of their continued value, many databases from breaches as far back as 2012 and earlier as still actively traded and sold in the digital blackmarket, and as technology continues to advance, you can bet that even strongly encrypted databases will eventually be cracked. If your account and password only showed up in the Dropbox.com breach, you could consider your password relatively safe (change it anyways!) for now, but if you used it elsewhere, and that account was exposed in another breach, like the LinkedIn.com breach that happened in the same year, and you used the same password as you did for Dropbox, your security is considerably more compromised. Multiply that exposure for every other breach you were a part of and used the same password again, and we can’t even account for the breaches that haven’t yet been publicized!
Long story short: check HaveIBeenPwned.com, change your passwords, and don’t reuse passwords!
