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 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 and 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.
The Dropbox security breach is just one example of how even big companies are susceptible to damage by sophisticated cyber attacks. But while Dropbox was quickly mitigate 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 educate their staff on how identify potential cyberattacks.