Dropbox drops unlimited storage plans, citing abuse by crypto miners

Cloud storage provider Dropbox has announced a it would discontinue its “unlimited” storage policy offered under its Dropbox Advanced plan and will replace it with a metered model to better manage the unexpectedly high usage patterns.  These patterns, according to the team’s announcement, include unauthorized use of those data plans for crypto mining activities.

Unauthorized use

According to the announcement, the design of Dropbox Advanced was tailored toward businesses, offering them the flexibility of unlimited storage as their teams expanded. However, the policy inadvertently lured customers who were instead leveraging the platform for purposes such as crypto mining and pooling storage. It was reported that these customers often consumed storage volumes thousands of times above genuine business customers, posing a risk of degraded service quality for all customers.