Just over a couple of weeks ago we wrote about Dropbox users receiving spam emails on their accounts that led many people to believe that the file-hosting site had been hacked. When Dropbox admitted that they had brought in “an outside team of experts” to help their own security team, this only served to further strengthen the view that something had gone drastically wrong.

This week saw the admission that a number of Dropbox accounts had been hacked. Yesterday in a blog post by the company’s VP of Engineering, Aditya Agarwal, it was revealed that usernames and passwords were stolen from third-party websites, which were then used to sign in to a “small number of Dropbox accounts”.

While it hasn’t been specified how many Dropbox accounts have been breached, the company has been in contact with the affected users and advised them on how they can further protect their accounts. The file-hosting site is also taking steps to bolster its own security, as laid out in its blog post:

• Two-factor authentication, a way to optionally require a unique code in addition to your password when signing in. (Coming in a few weeks)
• New automated mechanisms to help identify suspicious activity. We’ll continue to add more of these over time.
• A new page that lets you examine all active logins to your account.
• In some cases, we may require you to change your password. (For example, if it’s commonly used or hasn’t been changed in a while)

While Dropbox acted quickly to protect the data it had been holding for millions of users by bringing it outside security experts, this is just one more incident that highlights to problems related to entrusting your data to third-parties. If you have important, private files that you need to share with a group(s) of people, then hosting them in the cloud can be a risky move.

With DADapp you can share files privately with whoever you want, without having to send them in an email or upload them to a third-party hosting service. The User2User capability allows users to establish direct connections with the recipients and share files securely with them, without the need to go through any other channels. To start using DADapp for the easy, private sharing of photos, music, videos and files, visit our website and download DADapp for Windows or Mac now.