Looks like there is no stoppage to the data breach as we hear another massive data breach of the popular Quora.com. Quora is a place to gain and share knowledge. It’s a platform to ask questions and connect with people who contribute unique insights and quality answers. Quora said that the hackers breached their network and accessed various sensitive personal data that amounted to 100 million users.
The information comprises of the protected passwords, email addresses, full names, data imported from linked networks and various non-public content which includes all the answer requests, upvotes and downvotes, direct messages which came over, all the public content and comments.
Quora published a post on Monday afternoon and explained that on Friday they discovered an unauthorized access. After this happened they hired a digital forensics and a security firm to investigate the matter, they also informed and reported the breach to law enforcement officials.
The post stated that “We believe we’ve identified the root cause and taken steps to address the issue, although our investigation is ongoing, and we’ll continue to make security improvements, We will continue to work both internally and with our outside experts to gain a full understanding of what happened and take any further action as needed.”
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. – Adam D’Angelo, CEO at Quora
Immediately after this Quora hack took place, Quora logged out all the affected users, invalidated old passwords and emailed affected users. Quora also asked its users to reset their passwords.
The smart thing that benefitted Quora was, the hackers were unable to access any of posted questions or answers written anonymously. While the platform doesn’t keep the identities of the people stored who are posting for discussing their personal and sensitive matters, it couldn’t protect the accounts who discussed their personal matter via direct message.
These sort of data breach is an alert for the users to create unique passwords protecting from different account services you avail.
Just a few days before the Quora breach, on Friday the enormous hotel chain, The Marriott International also complained about its system breach. Marriott Starwood data breach allowed hackers access to the passport numbers, card data (credit) and other personal details of over 500 million customers.
