Nir Goldshlager just saved your identity. One of the world’s top white hat security researchers, Goldshlager this week helped Skype and Dropbox fix a critical security flaw that could have let hackers take control of their users’ Facebook accounts. Tomorrow Goldshlager will detail how he found the exploit, but he gave TechCrunch the early heads up. Here’s how hackers exploit the hole.
Amazon's Cloud Drive was unveiled two years ago for the primary purpose of letting customers store music files purchased from Amazon. Although you could upload other files to Cloud Drive, it wasn't a replacement for cloud storage services like Dropbox because it didn't automatically sync files from one computer to another.
Several file-sharing companies have been billed as "Dropbox for the enterprise." Turns out Dropbox wants that title as well. The company has made that point clear as it has rolled out features aimed at alleviating IT departments' skepticism of the service's viability and trustworthiness in a corporate setting.
Here’s one for business or otherwise privacy-hungry users of Chrome: BoxCryptor has released an experimental plugin that makes it possible to encrypt and decrypt files stored in Dropbox and Google Drive without needing to fiddle around with desktop apps.
Dropbox has announced that it has reached 100 million users, an impressive number to be sure. For comparison's sake, here's Wikipedia's list of virtual communities with more than 100 million users, which currently has seven companies on it, so Dropbox has just joined a very exclusive club. Twitter, for example, hit 100 million earlier this year, and Facebook has 166.1 million users in the US at last count. To think that Dropbox is shoulder to shoulder with those kinds of companies is very impressive indeed.
With more and more of our life headed to the cloud, ensuring solid security is more important than ever. With everyone from big corporations like Sony to porn sites and online games suffering the indignity of security breaches in the past year, it is clear that one needs to be incredibly careful about how they manage their online lives. With more and more software being released that lets you access cloud applications from multiple devices, security becomes even more important.
Several weeks ago, reports started to trickle out that a number of Dropbox users were under attack from spam. Since then, Dropbox has been investigating those attacks (with some help from a third-party) and today gave the first update on the progress, saying that some accounts were indeed accessed by hackers, but that it is now adding two-factor authentication and other security features to prevent further problems.
Dropbox's ongoing investigation into a possible security breach has not produced any evidence that its systems have been infiltrated, according to an update Friday to the company's user forum.
"As of today, we've found no intrusions into our internal systems and no unauthorized activity in Dropbox accounts," said the update, posted last Friday.
European Dropbox users have reported a sudden spike in spam received by email addresses associated with their accounts, raising fears that the service has suffered a security compromise.
Google Drive has been spinning around in the rumour mill for months now, but according to word from the Wall Street Journal, the cloud storage service is set to go live any moment now. Will a seamlessly integrated storage service drop a bomb on rivals like Dropbox?
Google Drive is the search giant’s answer to iCloud, Dropbox, Sky Drive and the myriad other online storage solutions. While Google Docs currently lets you store all manner of files to the tune of 1GB, but you have to pay for more and there are limits to do with file sizes for certain types of documents.
