MANILA, Philippines – Cloud storage provider Dropbox recently recovered from an outage on Saturday, January 11, but Twitter users posing as a hacking group may have brought further anxiety to many by claiming to have breached the company’s security and taken its services down.
In its blog, Dropbox updated its users, saying that the site was down and that it happened “during routine internal maintenance, and was not caused by internal factors.”
During the downtime, however, Twitter accounts appearing to be connected to hacking groups Anonymous and The 1775 Sec played an elaborate hoax, linking to a list of leaked user information.
Updates and follow-ups from technology website TechCrunch and security researcher Wesley McGrew disproved that notion. McGrew, tweeting on @McGrewSecurity called the dropbox leak a hoax, as the information released came from a list made before the attack.
Rows on @1775Sec "partial dropbox leak" match this, even the row numbers. Hoax. http://t.co/O8Og9h4EJG
— Wesley McGrew (@McGrewSecurity) January 11, 2014Dropbox responded to a TechCrunch request for updates by saying that the claims of leaked user information were a hoax and was not Dropbox data.
A known Anonymous Twitter account also clarified reports, saying that The 1775 Sec account went on “to troll the media & members of Anonymous, in the name of Aaron Swartz,” an Internet activist who committed suicide last year.
Hackers @1775Sec DDoS attacks http://t.co/QCuRJL3hm4 And then goes on to Troll the Media & members of Anonymous, in the name of Aaron Swartz
— Anonymous Priest (@YourAnonPriest) January 11, 2014– Rappler.com
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