Popular cloud storage service, Dropbox has gone offline for a while, and while the company claims it is under maintenance, a hacker group has claimed credit for taking it down.
Visiting http://www.dropbox.com/ will now redirect you to https://status.dropbox.com/ , from where the above image was taken.
The hackers, calling themselves “1775 Sec”, have claimed that they have compromised the Dropbox website.
The hackers were infuriated when Dropbox pretended that they are undergoing “a routine internal maintenance!”. This is what Dropbox said on their blog.
We are aware of an issue currently affecting the Dropbox site. We have identified the cause, which was the result of an issue that arose during routine internal maintenance, and are working to fix this as soon as possible. We apologize for any inconvenience.
The post was later updated to read,
We are aware that the Dropbox site is currently down. This was caused during routine internal maintenance, and was not caused by external factors. We are working to fix this as soon as possible. We apologize for the inconvenience.
While most of the Internet media seem to believe that the website is under maintenance, 1775 Sec threatened to leak a database of it’s users , and they actually did, though we are not going to link to it for security reasons.
The reason for the hack is to honor the late American hacker/computer programmer Aaron Swartz, who committed suicide last year on this very day.
The hackers were applauded by the more famous, Anonymous group’s Korean account, for the hack and the leak.
The compromise was done using a massive DDoS attack, 1775 Sec claimed in another tweet.
Dropbox are yet to react to the database leak, the website is still down at the time of writing this post.
Update:
The hack was merely a Denial of Service attack by 1775 Sec, and the leaked information was a very old database. Apparently they merely did this to troll the media.
Thanks to Peter for pointing this out.