Dropbox changes storage policy after crypto miners use the cloud for mining operations
The online storage company, Dropbox, announced that it would stop providing its Advanced plan subscribers unlimited storage. The business claimed it took this action after learning that some users abused the service for resource-intensive activities like cryptocurrency mining. In a blog post from August 24, Dropbox claimed that while their unlimited Advanced plan was intended to give “all the space you need” to real business clients, it had seen an increase in users who were consuming “thousands of times more storage than our genuine business customers.”
The business added that some users were sharing or reselling their storage with others for personal use. New users of Dropbox will receive 15 terabytes of storage, which is enough space to store 100 million documents, according to the company’s announcement that it has converted to a metered storage model. The increasing unintentional usage rise has been attributed by the cloud storage service Dropbox to “other services making similar policy changes.” It claimed that in recent months, Microsoft and Google have also withdrawn their unlimited storage services.
The business admitted that its decision is “disappointing” to some of its clients. Still, it explained why enforcing a list of prohibited use cases would be impossible. Additionally, the business warned about the danger posed by crypto-jacking malware, which can infect a computer linked to the internet or a cloud storage account and exploit those accounts’ resources to build a virtual machine that mines cryptocurrencies. The business used research from Google from 2021, showing that some attackers could steal a user’s account and install mining software in just 22 seconds while aiming for customers of its storage platform.
