Time to change your Dropbox password

It's become clear that some details of Dropbox accounts have been stolen and the owners have been receiving spam email. Dropbox has admitted this breach on their blog and promised some new security measures coming soon, including two factor authentication. In the mean time it's a good idea to change your Dropbox password, just to be on the safe side. Luckily this is simple to do, even if you access Dropbox from several computers, as I do.

Luckily changing your password is very simple. In fact you only have to change it once on the Dropbox website and it is changed for you on all of the computers that Dropbox is installed on. I'm not sure whether that's a sign of good security but it does save time.

Go to www.dropbox.com and click on the Sign in link at the top right. Enter your username and password and click on Sign in.

Click on your name at the top right of the screen and then on Settings. Click on the Security tab.

The first part of this tab lists all of the computers that you have access to your Dropbox account. My list is perhaps unusually long as several computers have been through several operating systems and each one is displayed separately. Scroll down this page to the bottom and click on the Change password link.

Enter your old password in the top text box and then enter your new password in the box below. The grey bars just beneath will change colour as you go through Very weak, Weak, So-So, Good and Great. Click on the blue i for help on making a secure password.

Click on Change password when you are happy with your password.

I'm very pleased to hear about the plans for two factor authentication. This is where you have to use two passwords to log in. Normally one of these passwords is generated randomly with each login as you will have experienced with an online banking dongle or the text message code from Google. They add a little inconvience but that's nothing compared to the problems of having an account hacked.

The other important lesson is not to use the same pasword for multiple accounts.