For enterprises moving more business and customer data to the cloud, investigating and selecting an online storage solution can be a challenging task. A primary concern is the level of data security offered by the sites being considered. While the theme holds true across all of the major providers (Box, DropBox, SkyDrive), for the purpose of illustration I’ll focus on DropBox since it is arguably the most popular site boasting over 100 million users.
Here is where some of the concerns begin; DropBox experienced a major security breach in July 2012, specifically involving user passwords. In response to the attack, DropBox attempted to improve password security by implementing two-factor authentication.
But just last month though, a pair of researchers released a paper claiming they had reverse-engineered the DropBox application, providing details for how hackers could potentially access private user data. Their goal in releasing this paper was actually innocuous, but provides a disturbing example of what hackers can still do to bypass password security methods to access valuable data stored in DropBox.