This way I get to safely use Dropbox, Box.com, Egnyte and others directly from my PC and my mobile device. You might say I am biased, but my preferred solution is SafeGuard Encryption for Cloud Storage and Sophos Mobile Encryption.

Most of us aren’t willing to give up the convenience of the cloud, but that doesn’t mean we live by the motto “In cloud we trust.” The best approach to data security is to trust no one.

The reality is that if you upload data to the cloud and you haven’t encrypted it with your own keys, you are at the mercy of whoever does hold the keys. If Dropbox is encrypting your content, how can it tell you are a movie pirate? It’s simple.

Last month Dropbox caused a bit of a stir when a user attempting to share some copyrighted material with a friend received a DMCA block notification. Later it turns out a Dropbox employee was compromised leading to a bunch of Dropbox users’ email addresses being leaked. A few years ago it was shown that you could grab a file from a Dropbox user’s PC and use it to access their files without authentication. It is surprising to me that organizations like Dropbox seem to think that it is safe to store documents on their service and share them using a secret URL.Īre we really supposed to believe our data is protected and that no one will discover our magic link?ĭropbox security issues aren’t really anything new. In a blog posted on 5 May, Dropbox claims to have fixed the flaw without providing any detail as to how they went about resolving the issue. If you shared the “encrypted” document with a friend using the “secret” URL and your friend clicked on a link in that document, you would leak the “secret” URL to the site hosting the link and anyone else observing your traffic (for non-HTTPs links). The flaw involved uploading a document to Dropbox that contained links and then sharing the document with a friend. Surprisingly, the latest installment in the Dropbox story involves these so-called secret links (you thought I was going to say Sasquatch again, didn’t you?). Let me start out by saying that I am not foolish enough to believe in the tooth fairy, Sasquatch (aka Big Foot) nor secret links.

Dropbox links leaked