Quora Hit by Security Breach Affecting 100 Million Users

100 million Quora users were affected by an unauthorized access to one of its systems by a malicious third party. Account information which include name, email address, encrypted password and data are imported from linked networks authorized by users may have been compromised, the knowledge-sharing website has declared recently.

Quora CEO Adam D’Angelo has apologized immediately after the incident where the hackers stole personal information of over 100 million of its users. D’Angelo wrote in a blog post, “it is our responsibility to make sure things like this don't happen and we failed to meet that responsibility”.

"We are working rapidly to investigate the situation further and take the appropriate steps to prevent such incidents in the future. We’re very sorry for any concern or inconvenience this may cause,” the Quora CEO added. In order to prevent further damage, the company is now in the process of sending emails to users whose data have been compromised.

He also said, that the breach which was discovered last week has not affected the question and answers that are written anonymously, as the platform does not store the identities of people who post anonymous content.

D’Angelo also said, “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”. Quora also said that it has notified law enforcement officials almost immediately and also informed, “We have retained a leading digital forensics and security firm to assist us”.

Security expert Troy Hunt is also one of those who are affected by the data breach on Quora. Troy Hunt tweeted, “Short of not using online services at all, there's simply nothing you can do to 'not' be in a breach, there's only things you can do to minimize the impact when it inevitably happens”.

All the Quora users were asked to reset their password or will be prompted to do so when they will try to log in and the users who are willing to delete their account can do so by going in the settings section, the deactivation of the account will be done immediately.

The majority of the content accessed by the hackers was already public on Quora, but the compromise of account and other private information is of serious concern. The site’s data breach is the latest in a series of high-profile hacks, which includes Facebook, YouTube and Twitter.

Quora Inc is a California based Company with over 300 million monthly unique visitors. Adam D’Angelo and Charlie Cheever, two former Facebook employees, founded it in the year 2009. In fact, D’Angelo was the former Chief Technology Officer at Facebook in 2009.