Last week, online storage website giant Dropbox asked users who signed up for its services before 2012 to change their passwords.

The cloud storage company was hacked in 2012. However, Dropbox had denied that any account was compromised until recently when the company acknowledged that data breach and revealed its magnitude.

Although Dropbox has been telling its users that this password change is merely a "preventive measure" the reality is much different.  Email IDs and passwords associated with Dropbox were allegedly also hacked.

It was estimated that around 68,680,741 accounts have been compromised following the 2012 data breach, which anonymous Dropbox employees have confirmed to be true.  

Dropbox said that the password resets that it completed last week covered all of the affected users, so the Dropbox accounts are protected.

Since there is no simple way to know whether your account was hacked into and your data was compromised, an online service called "Have I been pwned" has been created by Troy Hunt for users to check if they were affected by the data breach.

In an emailed statement on Tuesday, Dropbox's head of trust and security, Patrick Heim said, "We've confirmed that the proactive password resets we completed last week covered all potentially impacted users."

"We initiated this reset as a precautionary measure, so that the old passwords from prior to mid-2012 can't be used to improperly access Dropbox accounts," he added.

The 68 million accounts hacked represents over 13 percent of Dropbox's customer base of 500 million.