Dropbox Responds To Security Flap
Why has Dropbox been opening links in uploaded documents?
That question surfaced Thursday after a security researcher found that links inside documents that he uploaded to the file-sharing service had been accessed. "I had the opportunity recently to beta-test HoneyDocs.com, a Web app that generates documents that can 'buzz home,'" wrote Daniel McCauley Thursday on WNC InfoSec Blog. "This is done by a unique embedded GET request that is initiated when the generated document has been opened."
The first "phone home" operation occurred just 10 minutes after McCauley uploaded a Zip file that contained a "sting" .doc file generated by HoneyDocs. The link-opening activity traced to an IP address that appeared to be an Amazon EC-2 instance in Seattle, which listed "LibreOffice" in the HTTP user-agent header. "All in all, I made three attempts to upload embedded documents and all appeared to be opened from different Amazon instances," McCauley said, noting that the Dropbox infrastructure is also built to use Amazon S3 buckets.
