Its website dropbox appeared offline late Friday night. The company published a statement stating that there was no question as to why maintenance work was being carried out. A few minutes before the company's statement however, the hacker team The 1775 Sec published in Twitter that they were responsible for the downtime of the Dropbox website, and that they did so in the honor of the developer and activist Aaron Swartz on the eve of one year of his death.
[tweet_embed id = 421820685766250496] The news came after reports that a subdomain of MIT had been occupied by hackers in honor of the late programmer.
Anonymous broadcast the tweet minutes later, repeating the original statement. 1775 Sec, continuing, said they had given time to dropbox to patch the vulnerabilities in their website, threatening a leakage data if the issue is not resolved.
Indeed, the website was not available, displaying a message that it was "having problems." In a statement sent to The Verge, Dropbox said the issue came from someone inside the company. But when asked directly about the possibility of one externalof mixing, Dropbox would neither confirm nor deny this possibility, saying:
We have identified the cause, which was the result of a problem that occurred during the routine of an internal maintenance, and we are working to correct it as soon as possible… We apologize for any inconvenience.
Another Twitter account claiming to be linked to the hacktivist movement Anonymous published alleged Dropbox user information, but several security researchers pointed out that the information contained in the alleged leak came from other, unrelated breaches. After the leak, the group 1775 Sec via Twitter claimed that the attack to Dropbox it was only a distributed denial-of-service (DDoS), and it had not breached the company's security, nor had any Dropbox users' data been compromised:
