It’s a legitimate concern, and it’s precisely why secure VDRs exist - to enable secure document collaboration and review while strictly controlling user access and permissions. If they could stay silent on a hack of this magnitude, the reasoning goes, how can they be trusted to keep your documents and account information safe? Even today, information stolen from Dropbox can be cross-referenced on sites like, which allows you to enter an email address to see if an account has been compromised in one of the many data breaches from various tech companies over the years.īut what took most people by surprise during the 2016 Dropbox fiasco was that while the company had announced that an attack had occurred in 2012, the scope of it was seemingly kept under wraps for years.

Unlike a secure VDR, or virtual data room, which holds your files under multiple layers of security and round-the-clock surveillance that can’t be matched by larger, cloud-based solutions intended for the masses, Dropbox left a dormant hack that they knew about sit unaddressed for years while hackers manipulated the data.īy September, the hack’s five gigabytes of data that included email addresses and hashed passwords were for sale on the dark web for the cost of two bitcoins, or the equivalent of about $1,200 at the time. Confirmed by security researchers within days, the hack was the biggest in Dropbox’s history, and it illustrated the danger of hosting sensitive material on the growing platform. When the Vice-owned tech publication Motherboard reported on the incident, they were in possession of the hack’s loot, some 68 million account records. After learning about a set of emails and passwords that was stolen from their servers in 2012, it wasn’t until 2016 that the true impact of the hack would materialize, and the hack was much, much bigger than the company originally admitted. Millions of people had their login credentials exposed, which prompted the company to reset all passwords going back four years. In 2016, file hosting site Dropbox was hacked. Have you been tasked with managing your company’s capital-raising initiative and need a way to share sensitive information? If so, then your “to-do” list probably includes finding a solution for managing all the documents involved in these activities. If you’re launching the due diligence process for your firm’s next (or first) acquisition, you may be wondering if using Dropbox for due diligence is okay.

Dropbox links security