Dropbox.com is down for many users and their main website is taken offline supposedly by a group of hackers claiming that they even stole email addresses from them, causing quite a stir in the Dropbox user community.
Dropbox website is supposedly down for a “routine maintenance”, after which, a tweet from hackers belonging to Anonymous claiming that they’ve breached the popular cloud storage website.
BREAKING NEWS: We have just compromised the @Dropbox Website http://t.co/HtnbT5cyhE #hacked #compromised
— Anonymous (@AnonOpsKorea) January 11, 2014
Besides this, another hacktivist group, The 1775 Sec also tweeted that they are the ones that took Dropbox down, with a similar tweet.
BREAKING NEWS: We have just compromised the @Dropbox Website http://t.co/HqnsZOLSXR #hacked #compromised
— The 1775 Sec (@1775Sec) January 11, 2014
The 1775 Sec has also claimed that they successfully obtained user email addresses supposedly from Dropbox, which is subsequently posted here. The group has said that they are doing this in the name of Aaron Swartz, a well known digital activist, as this is this 1st year death anniversary since his departure on the 11 January 2013.
Dropbox is now up and has since released information that this is a hoax and the site being offline was caused by their own internal maintenance, not from external means. Regarding the email addresses, Dropbox says that it was not their data, and was published earlier by another individual.
I would think that the group, The 1775 Sec actually DDoS attacked Dropbox in time with the routine maintenance to make it look like the attack actually brought the whole site down and user information is leaked from them which in actual fact, are excerpts from another published Pastebin data. Even one of the Anonymous’s twitter accounts are denying their actions.
Hackers @1775Sec DDoS attacks http://t.co/QCuRJL3hm4 And then goes on to Troll the Media & members of Anonymous, in the name of Aaron Swartz
— Anonymous Priest (@YourAnonPriest) January 11, 2014
(source)