DivShare, an online service for storing and sharing video, photos, music and documents, has had a security breach. The company announced on its blog tonight that "a malicious user" had accessed its database, "which included user e-mail addresses and other basic profile information." The startup states that "no financial information has been accessed by any unauthorized parties." After the Omnidrive troubles, it's yet another reminder that storing your files on a startup's servers is risky business. ]]>
DivShare has been in the news before for dubious reasons. In November it put itself up for sale on a domain name selling forum. DivShare co-founder David Altschu told VentureBeat at the time that "we feel the product is complete, and we want to find a company that can help support [its] growth and keep ahead of it, which has been our problem for a little while now."
It doesn't appear as if the sale happened - an update on DivShare's blog in January claimed that it was "turning down some big buyout offers".
While it's good that DivShare has been open about the security breach and they appear to have taken swift measures in fixing it, unfortunately it raises more concerns about startups which offer online storage. When it comes to any personal data online, as a user you want to be absolutely certain that it is both secure and going to be available in future - no matter what.
Would you trust your data with a company that has this to say after it's database has been compromised: "...we recommend that you change your account password and the passwords on any private folders as a security precaution." Yikes!
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