100 Million Users' Data Were Stolen From Quora

Quora announced that its systems were hacked last week and up to 100 million users data including users’ names, their passwords’ encrypted versions and their email addresses were stolen. If a user allows Quora access to their other social network accounts, that might have been taken too.

Some private actions including requests for answers, direct messages and downvotes may have also been taken. As Quora says it doesn’t keep track of identifiable information for anonymous posts, these content still remain anonymous.

In a blog post, Adam D’Angelo, Quora CEO said that the majority of the content that has been accessed has already gone public on the website. But the act of stealing account and other private information is significant. Emails are being sent out to affected users.

Quora says it has already reported the matter to authorities. A digital forensics firm has also been hired for investigation. For the time being, the company only discloses that ‘a malicious third party’ had gained unauthorized access to Quora’s systems. The company discovered the act of violation on Friday.

100 million user accounts were stolen, which is considered a substantial amount and a major Quora’s registered users’ portion. In 2015, D’Angelo announced that the company reached a number of 200 million visitors a month, which is probably resulted from search traffic.

D’Angel also mentioned that Quora is trying to keep the incident at bay. The company is also trying to prevent another situation like this from happening in the future. He said that for further investigation, the company was working at full speed. Appropriate steps will be taken to avoid similar incidents.

In the last few years, breaches from which a massive amount of information was stolen have been more and more common. Hackers were able to hack a large amount of information because data was built up over the years. Last week, Marriott made it to the headline after 500 million guests’ information was leaked. In September, up to 29 million Facebook accounts were also stolen from Facebook.