Dropbox Has Hired Outside Experts To Investigate Possible Security Breach
The spam attack and related possible address leak over at Dropbox may be even more serious than we originally thought. According to a message posted by the company over on its forums, they've now brought in …
Context & Ripple Effects
A day after users reported spam and Dropbox experienced an outage, the company has escalated its response through an external review. The spam reports and outage had raised, but not established, the possibility of an address leak.
The episode lands while Dropbox is expanding Pro storage in a competitive cloud-sync market. It also renews attention to a 2011 complaint that alleged misleading security claims; that allegation was not a finding of fact.
First-order effects
- Dropbox moves the incident from a customer-facing disruption to a formal security investigation, placing its handling of user data under closer scrutiny.
- Users affected by the spam reports have no confirmed explanation for the suspected address leak, but Dropbox's external review makes the inquiry a defined company response.
Second-order effects
- Dropbox's cloud-storage rivals, including Box.net, gain a clearer basis to compete for security-sensitive users as well as on storage capacity.
- For Dropbox, the value of its Pro-storage expansion is more closely tied to whether customers view its account and contact-data protections as credible.
Third-order effects
- If cloud-sync providers repeatedly face incidents tied to account or address data, security response practices will become a more durable competitive requirement alongside storage and synchronization features.
The trend: Cloud hosting and synchronization services are competing increasingly on the trustworthiness of their security operations, not only on capacity and product features.