It's no secret that cyberattacks are on the rise
That no company is immune to cyberattacks is no surprise. Dropbox, one of the largest cloud storage companies, was the latest victim when their GitHub account was compromised. This allowed attackers access to 130 code repositories, which contained sensitive data.
Dropbox was notified of a potential breach on October 14th from GitHub, who observed suspicious activity coming from the account starting one day earlier.
On Tuesday, November 1, 2022, Dropbox released an announcement that said, "our investigation has found that the code accessed by this threat actor contained some credentials—primarily, API keys—used by Dropbox developers."
The data contains the names and email addresses of a few thousand Dropbox employees, current customers, past customers, sales leads, and vendors.
A phishing attack sank Dropbox
A successful email phishing campaign, targeting Dropbox employees and pretending to be from CircleCI (a continuous integration and delivery platform), has been attributed to a recent data breach. The emails directed the victims to a landing page where they were asked to enter their GitHub credentials.
Dropbox states that the hackers did not manage to get access to customers' accounts, passwords, or payment information. In addition, none of Dropbox's core apps or infrastructure were compromised. As a result of this attack, Dropbox is taking further steps to secure its environment by using WebAuthn with hardware tokens or biometrics.
It was almost immediately after the compromise that GitHub detected the exfiltration of content from private repositories. The threat actors used VPNs and proxy services to make it more difficult to trace and identify them.
My perspective
The Dropbox security breach is just one example of how even big companies are susceptible to damage by sophisticated cyberattacks. But while Dropbox quickly mitigated the damage caused by the attack, it's a reminder to all businesses that they're always vulnerable to these kinds of threats. Therefore, it's important for employers to educate their staff on how to identify potential cyberattacks.
Round up the usual suspects,
and break out the security training
By Denis Wilson
Thanks for reading this post. I always take into mind that your time and attention are precious. And these posts need to be timely, to the point, and short.
For more tips on thriving with small business technology, check out the other blog posts at DWPIA Blogs. You can also find me on LinkedIn, Facebook, and Twitter.
I am also a published author and speaker on cloud computing, work-at-home, and cybersecurity. I work extensively with business and professional associations to provide free small business technology education programs.
Contact me if you would like me to speak to your association
