Quora, the popular website where members exchange questions and answers, reports that its data has been compromised. According a blog post Quora uploaded several hours ago, the breach happened on Friday last week. It discovered that the user information of up to 100 million users was robbed, including usernames, email addresses, and an encrypted version of their passwords. To investigate the situation and find a cause the forum has put its internal security team to work. It has also hired a digital forensics and security firm for help.
According to Quora, some content and actions that are both private and public may have been stolen apart from users’ personal account information. This includes answers, answer requests, comments, downvotes, and direct messages. Quora says, however, that a low percentage of Quora users have sent or received such messages. It also includes data imported from linked networks (when authorised by users).
“The overwhelming majority of the content accessed was already public on Quora, but the compromise of account and other private information is serious,” wrote, Adam D’Angelo, the Chief Executive Officer of Quora in the blog post. The company is currently in the process of sending out emails to those whose data was affected. Quora recommends changing of password even if the lost information was encrypted. To win the trust of its users once again the company included a note of commitment towards improved data security.
It appears data breaches are becoming more and more frequent and the size of the enterprise attacked doesn’t seem to matter. One of the biggest data breaches of this year occurred in September when Facebook’s Vice President of Product Management wrote in a detailed blog post how the company had lost the data of 50 million users to online hackers. Users affected were logged out of their current sign-ins and asked to sign in again.