Quora Reports Data Breach, 100 Million Users Affected

The knowledge sharing platform, Quora announced on Monday that its users fall prey to an unauthorized access as hackers may have stolen account information of around 100 million Quora users.

The information which was compromised in the data breach includes email addresses, private direct messages, encrypted passwords, imported data from other linked networking sites and the questions and answers that were written on the platform by Quorans. The Q&A website said that the information pertaining to the users’ location and contacts was also being compromised.  

"The overwhelming majority of the content accessed was already public on Quora, but the compromise of account and other private information is serious,"  Quora CEO, Adam D'Angelo, wrote in an associated blog post. Meanwhile, he noted, the questions and answers that were posted anonymously were spared by the massive data breach; anonymous content remained unaffected.

The website which was founded by two former Facebook employees, D’Angelo and Charlie Cheever, said that it is engaged with security experts and law enforcement officials to probe into the matter and devise effective solutions. Notably, additional preventive measures have been taken by the company to strengthen the security and retain the trust that is invested by millions of users across the globe.

Aside from that, the company said that it is logging out all of its affected users in order to prevent further injury. Additionally, victims have been notified timely via an email, they are advised to not continue with the initial passwords and set up a new one.

"It is our responsibility to make sure things like this don't happen, and we failed to meet that responsibility. We recognize that in order to maintain user trust, we need to work very hard to make sure this does not happen again," said D'Angelo, gracefully acknowledging his duties, in the blog. 

from E Hacking News - Latest Hacker News and IT Security News https://ift.tt/2G1KzFX