Yesterday, Quora announced that one of their systems was hacked and approximately 100 million user’s data has been exposed to an unauthorized third-party. The breach was discovered on 30th November, after which the team immediately notified law enforcement and hired a digital forensics and security consulting company to uncover details of the attack.
Quora is a strongly knit community of experts and intellectuals that is estimated to have almost 700 million visits per month and is the 95th largest site in the world. Adam D’Angelo, CEO of Quora states that for approximately 100 million Quora users, the following information may have been compromised:
- Account information such as name, email address, encrypted (hashed) password, data imported from linked networks when authorized by users
- Public content and actions, including questions, answers, comments, and upvotes
- Non-public content and actions, like answer requests, downvotes, and direct messages
Quora claims that users who post questions and answers anonymously are safe as the site does not store the identities of people who post anonymous content.
Quora has started notifying users whose data has been compromised, via email. They are also logging out all Quora users who may have been affected. Users that use a password as their authentication method, Quora will be invalidating their passwords. Quora has also advised users to head over to their help center for answers to more specific questions related to the breach.
The breach comes right after the Marriott International hotel group breach that impacted half a billion users.
Quora concludes that “The investigation is still ongoing, we have already taken steps to contain the incident, and our efforts to protect our users and prevent this type of incident from happening in the future are our top priority as a company.”
Head over to Quora’s official site to know more about this news.
Read Next
A new data breach on Facebook due to malicious browser extensions allowed almost 81,000 users’ private data up for sale, reports BBC News
Uber fined by British ICO and Dutch DPA for nearly $1.2m over a data breach from 2016
Use TensorFlow and NLP to detect duplicate Quora questions [Tutorial]
