You may have read about a recent security breach at Dropbox.  Chapman signed an institutional agreement with Dropbox in 2015, and as a result, we have hundreds of Dropbox users on campus.  So we think it’s important to reach out to the campus and outline any impact on Chapman.  Back in 2012, prior to the Chapman agreement, DropBox experienced a high level security breach.  This breach resulted in over 68 million user accounts being compromised by hackers and personal information being sold online on the dark web.  Recently, an article titled “Why DropBox’s data breach response is still wrong” was released and it addresses this incident and how it was not appropriately handled by DropBox. The article raises some valid concerns, so it is even more important to point out that this did not involve any Chapman University accounts

At this time, we know that Chapman University user accounts are not affected by this massive breach.  We are currently working with DropBox to get more information and will update this post when more information becomes available.

There are many reasons as to why, and it is important that we highlight the top 3 reasons.

  1. Chapman University has created a security structure that forces all users to create complex passwords using a combination of the following:
    • upper and lower case letters
    • Numbers
    • Special Characters (ex: ! & # $ @ ^)
  2. Chapman University utilizes Single Sign On (SSO) which only allows users with Chapman University credentials access to services provided by the University.
  3. Chapman University user accounts are managed internally and does not rely on any 3rd party providers to manage user accounts.

For more information on the importance of creating strong passwords, please take a moment and check out the following blogs:

Pass-Phrases vs. Passwords

Pass-Phrases and the top 20 commonly used passwords on LinkedIn

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