Privacy & Security 2 min. read

Quora gets hacked: 100 million users exposed

Quora gets hacked: 100 million users exposed

It seems like there’s a new data breach every day. The latest? Quora, the question-and-answer website.

Adam D’Angelo, Quora’s CEO, announced that the company discovered a hack that affected up to 100 million users. According to a blog post from D’Angelo, the info that was accessed includes users’ names, email addresses, and passwords. Even data from their social media sites, including Twitter and Facebook, were stolen for users that chose to connect their Quora and social accounts.

The hackers also gathered data that allowed them to see what Quora pages a user viewed, the questions they’ve asked, answers they’ve given, along with upvoting and downvoting actions. Though most of this information is public, there is still a wealth of personal and private information that hackers now have access to—and that can be exploited to build fake profiles.

Currently, Quora is in the process of notifying all of its users. The company is taking measures to log affected users out of the site. D’Angleo claims that they have found the cause of the breach and have taken the steps to ensure it does not happen again. He also said that the company will continue to make improvements with security.

Many people who were affected had apparently forgotten that they even had an account on Quora. But with their name, email address, and password hacked, it’s now plausible that the information stolen could be used to access more sensitive sites—like online bank accounts.

After all, how many of these people do you think use the same password for multiple sites?

With so many data breaches happening these days, including the most recent Marriott hack, it’s a wise idea to ensure your accounts are secure (with two-factor authentication enabled where possible), and that you use a unique password for each account. A password manager tool can help with this.

In the case of the Quora data breach, the most important thing affected users should do is change their passwords immediately.  You should also pay attention to phishing attacks. This is where hackers send fake emails that look like they’re from the company that got breached. In the emails, there are links that inject harmful malware or even send you to a fake website that will then ask you to input personal information. 

In many cases, it’s not the hack itself that proves to be the most dangerous. It’s the subsequent attacks that prey on affected users. 


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Quora hack

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