Aaron Swartz
The cloud storage service Dropbox site was down Friday night. While Dropbox claimed maintenance issues, a hacker group, The 1775 Sec, claimed responsibility for the outage and said it was in honor of Aaron Swartz on the anniversary of his suicide.Swartz, the Highland Park native and hacktivist, killed himself a year ago as he faced charges of computer fraud and years in prison.
Dropbox displayed an error message on its homepage saying a maintenance event had triggered an error and that the company was moving to fix the issue, which it claimed to have identified. But The 1775 Sec claimed responsibility for the outage and communicated its intent with a news feed associated with the hacker group Anonymous. Below are a few of the exchanges:
Dropbox issued a statement regarding the outage, but made no mention of a security breach:
We are aware of an issue currently affecting the Dropbox site. We have identified the cause, which was the result of an issue that arose during routine internal maintenance, and are working to fix this as soon as possible. We apologize for any inconvenience.
Developer and programmer Dave Winer tweeted earlier in the evening that the Dropbox API was apparently down as well.
The 1775 Sec group the came back to tweet that it was a hoax:
UPDATE, 10:40 p.m.:
@Dropbox DUSTAAAAAA~AA
— txtdarihenpun (@deon) January 11, 2014
(h/t The Verge)
