Dropbox 'Vulnerable' to Heartbleed Bug, Opens Sydney Office

Despite criticisms and vulnerability regarding the Heartbleed bug, Dropbox, a U.S. online storage giant, has announced it will soon open in Sydney to further support Australian customers.

Dropbox's good business intentions has recently been slammed with criticisms after posting a blog in its users' forum announcing its servers is vulnerable to the Heartbleed bug, a Web encryption flaw that worries millions of Internet users worldwide for fear that their most private online data will be hacked, stolen and misused without their prior knowledge.

The Heartbleed bug news is spreading wildfire online with major Web services alerting their users of the threat in their systems. Various social media networks, e-commerce sites, email providers, and Web-based companies posted updates in their bulletins to inform users how they are going in terms of mitigating the risks brought by the bug.

Dropbox is being criticized by different news vendors for posting their Heartbleed stance on its forum where most users will not be able to read. The Australian, in its report, mentioned it is a common practice for online vendors to alert their customers via email when security issues are at stake, and Dropbox failed to do so.

Meanwhile, those who were able to read Dropbox's Heartbleed update on its forum are thankful with the report. It was supposed to be a good thing, if only not a very small fraction of its users were able to get the report.

"Our security team has been working around the clock on the Heartbleed bug and we wanted to give an update on what we've done to protect our users... As a reminder, it's always good to regularly change your Dropbox password while making sure that it is strong and not shared with any other services," a fraction of Dropbox's forum announcement posted by Andrew Bortz.

Dropbox is one of the biggest online storage platforms with an estimated 275 million users online. Users worldwide make the most of its functionality in sharing large-format files like videos, among others. Businesses also find the platform useful as document sharing is very easy using the service.

Despite criticisms of failing to communicate with users regarding the Heartbleed fail, Ross Piper, Dropbox VP of Enterprise, said in The Australian interview that they were evaluating ways to better communicate to their users and they are learning to get better in the process.

"We felt it incredibly important to address the vulnerability and we did that very quickly and we felt there was no risk to the users." Piper added.

He noted the cloud storage company's plans of opening a local office to serve Australian Dropbox users. Hiring is already ongoing with Dropbox announcing its Sydney opening in its official Twitter.