A group of hackers has claimed responsibility for taking down the Dropbox website,
saying that the act was to commemorate the one-year anniversary of activist Aaron Swartz.
Swartz was a programmer and writer who played a part in the creation of RSS, Creative Commons and Reddit. He later became an internet activist, founding the group Demand Progress, but was arrested and threatened with 35 years in prison after being accused of systematically downloading academic journal articles from JSTOR. He committed suicide on 11 January 2013.
The group 1775 Sec tweeted on the one-year-anniversary of his death that it had compromised the Dropbox website, though later admitted that the attack was merely a distributed denial of service (DDoS) attack and the group was unable to obtain any data.
Dropbox denied that the outage was malicious, issuing a statement saying: "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."
Updated 12 January 2013 10:51: Dropbox has got in touch with an additional denial, saying: "Claims that Dropbox was hacked were a hoax. The outage was caused by internal maintenance." You can read Dropbox's full explanation here.
This article was originally published by WIRED UK
