Online storage service Dropbox accidentally turned off password authentication for its 25 million users for four hours yesterday – although “much less than 1%” of those accounts were accessed during the period, the company said. It is still investigating whether any of those accounts were improperly accessed.
Dropbox CTO Arash Ferdowsi wrote that the company introduced a code change that caused a problem in the authentication mechanism. About four hours later, the problem was discovered, and Dropbox killed all of the sessions of those who were logged in at the time – “much less” than 1% of its users, Ferdowsi wrote.
A fix was introduced four hours later, he said.
“We’re conducting a thorough investigation of related activity to understand whether any accounts were improperly accessed,” Ferdowsi wrote. “This should never have happened. We are scrutinising our controls, and we will be implementing additional safeguards to prevent this from happening again.”
The company later said it had notified all those who were logged in at the time of the error and asked them to review details of activity on their account.”
IDG News Service
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