Quora Hacked, 100 Million Users’ Data Exposed – This Is What You Should Do Now
Quora has admitted its mistake, and have vowed to take legal action against the hackers.
Quora, the strongly knit community of experts and intellectuals have been hacked. More than 100 million users’ data have been breached, and exposed.
Quora has admitted this massive security failure, and have suggested what should you do now, if you are a Quora user.
Keep reading to find out more.
Contents
Quora Hacked: The Numbers
9 year old Quora is considered World’s 2nd best portal for finding real time answers to any query or subject – second only to Wikipedia in terms of scale and volume.
More than 300 million or 30 crore users visit Quora every month, asking questions and answering questions.
However, on November 30th, ‘a malicious third party’ gained illegal access to one of the servers maintained by Quora, and stole huge amounts of data.
This has been confirmed by Adam D’Angelo, who is the CEO of Quora.
He said, “We’re very sorry for any concern or inconvenience this may cause.”
Approximately 100 million users’ data was compromised in this data breach, which is a first for Quora.
Which Data Was Stolen?
As per Quora’s internal investigations, the following information and data may have been stolen:
- Encrypted passwords, account information (name, email id), data imported from linked networks like Twitter, Linkedin, Facebook
- Public information: Questions posted, answers given, comments, upvotes
- Non-Public information: Direct messages, downvotes, answer requests etc.
What Next?
The users who have been impacted in this data breach are being gradually communicated by the Quora team regarding this data breach, and being informed about this hack.
Besides, Quora team is proactively resetting their passwords as well, and once these users login to Quora, they will be prompted to change the password.
And finally, Quora is re-evaluating their security measures, and ensuring that such data breach doesn’t happen again. A leading digital forensics and security firm has been hired by Quora to find out the culprits. Hence, it is believed that legal action shall be taken against them.
What Should You Do Now?
First and foremost, if you are a Quora user, then changing password right this moment makes sense.
Besides, in case you have used the same password of Quora on other logins, and portals, then we will suggest that you change those passwords as well.
Quora has prepared a detailed article on the next steps, which you can find here.
