Oh dear. One of the world’s biggest consumer cloud service companies, Dropbox, is in the news for troubles this week. Here’s what you need to know:
Disappearing Files with Selective Sync
Dropbox recently dramatically increased the amount of storage that $99/year buys you, from 100GB to 1 terabyte. Yeah, that’s a lot. But since most of us don’t have a terabyte of storage on our devices, Dropbox created the opportunity to pick and choose what we wanted to store locally and what would only be stored in the cloud on their servers, a feature called Selective Sync.
The problem arose this week when a bug started erasing files of people who were using Selective Sync. Dropbox is working on a fix and offering a free year of storage to the users caught up in this mess.
Hacked Passwords
Yesterday some bad guys posted 400 usernames and passwords they claimed came from Dropbox. The group claims it has 7 million entries. Dropbox swears they haven’t been hacked, and they’ve examined the list and determined that the passwords are expired and old. The problem may stem from users using the same username/password combo for different sites (hey — don’t do that!). But whatever the reason for the problem, you can stay safer (note that I didn’t say “stay safe”) by checking your info at Have I Been Pwned? and enabling two-step verification.
