Quora Gets Hacked – 100 Million Users Data Stolen

Quora announced the incident late Monday after its team last
Friday discovered that an unidentified malicious third-party
managed to gain unauthorized access to one of its systems and stole
data on approximately 100 million users—that’s almost half of its
entire user base.

According to Adam D’Angelo, the chief executive officer and
co-founder of Quora, the personal user information compromised in
the breach includes:

• Account information, such as names, email addresses,
  encrypted (hashed) passwords, and data imported from linked social
  networks like Facebook and Twitter when authorized by users.
• Public content and actions, like questions, answers,
  comments, and upvotes.
• Non-public content and actions, including answer
  requests, downvotes, direct and messages (note that a low
  percentage of Quora users have sent or received such
  messages).

Quora said it stores salted and hashed passwords to prevent them
from cracking, but as a precaution, the company has logged all
compromised users out of their Quora accounts, and forcing them to
reset their passwords.

Quora said it is still investigating the breach and assured its
users that it working rapidly to “take the appropriate steps to
prevent such incidents in the future.”

Just last week, the world’s biggest hotel chain Marriott
confirmed a breach of its
Starwood properties^[3] that potentially
exposed personal and, in some cases, financial information from
half a billion guests, making it the second largest data breaches
in the history behind Yahoo 2016
hacking^[4] of nearly 3 billion
users.

In September, Facebook also announced a breach of its network
that allowed hackers to steal personal details for about 30 million
users^[5] using a zero-day
flaw^[6] in the platform’s “View
As” feature.

^[2]