Two of the biggest names in file sync had big updates this week – one disclosed more details about a recent security breach, and the other announced a massive round of funding that reaffirms just how big a phenomenon cloud lockers have become.
Last month Dropbox users started seeing more spam in their inboxes, including many who have opened e-mail accounts exclusively to sign up for a service. That led to an internal investigation and eventually the company found out how hackers got a hold of users’ email addresses: an employee with access to that information apparently fell victim to a phishing scam with a much smaller reach than the follow-up attack. Dropbox has been criticized by authorities for allowing workers to access users’ data, and that might be something that the company will have to deal with again in light of this latest incident.
Rival Box had much better news to report this week – it raised $125 million in a funding round led by General Atlantic and two other investors whose identities were not disclosed. That’s a lot of money, and the company’s CEO made it very clear that his firm has no intention of going public anytime soon.
Over in the enterprise space, Netflix open-sourced Chaos Monkey. Chaos Gorilla’s smaller cousin is a solution that Netflix developed in-house to better handle outages in its cloud infrastructure, which is mostly based on AWS. The code is lean enough for users to optimize it to their own provider if they’re not running on Amazon Web Services, and Chaos Monkey has successfully terminated tens of thousands of broken instances in Netflix’s environment.
On Monday Oracle also snatched a few headlines with the acquisition of Xsigio, a maker of networking virtualization solutions whose technology will be integrated with Oracle VM.
[...] all his devices remote wiped, and his Twitter account flooded with inappropriate posts. This is not the first time cloud data has been exploited, and it is certainly not as damaging as some other large scale [...]
[...] Of course, convenience is inversely proportional to security in the digital work (see here and here) and this is one of the reasons that there are mixed views on the cloud. Woz is not a fan because [...]
[...] is definitely a step towards customer security, following a hacker attack, where hackers got a hold of users’ email addresses and started sending spam e-mails from various [...]
[...] will be able to point to the integration as one of the ways in which it is trying to deal with the numerous security concerns that have plagued it [...]
[...] though Dropbox is extremely popular with consumers, they have to build defenses for heightened security measures as well. Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak voiced some very pointed [...]