You might have heard about the “Quora hacked”. That’s right and Quora is a popular question and answer site. Probably by now some of you might have received the email to reset your Quora password. It is estimated that the hackers stole up to 100 million users data which is a very serious concern. If you don’t know what is Quora, it’s a site where you can post question and there are many people who respond to your questions. For an unregistered user, it is free to view a single question and answer. However if you click any other Quora question link, it asks you to register.
When you register to Quora, you get the options to sign up by either using email or you can sign up using Google or Facebook account. Note that passwords stored are encrypted, however go ahead and change your password to a strong password.
According to the Quora CEO, Adam D’Angelo, a post was published describing this incident. Here are some of the points that were covered in the post.
- As per the post, it is mentioned that some user data was compromised as a result of unauthorized access to one of the systems by a malicious third party.
- The Quora security team is working rapidly to investigate the situation further and take the appropriate steps to prevent such incidents in the future.
Quora Hacked – What actually happened ?.
The Quora team on Friday discovered that user data was compromised by a third party who gained unauthorized access to one of their systems. Investigation is on and the internal security teams are working to find more details about this incident.
Quora Hacked – What information was involved ?.
It is imported to understand what user information could be hacked along with user names and passwords. For approximately 100 million Quora users, the following information may have been compromised:
- Account information – This includes complete information related to your account such as name, email address, encrypted (hashed) password.
- The hacked data could include the data imported from linked networks when authorized by users, questions, answers, comments, upvotes etc.
- As per Adam D’Angelo, Questions and answers written anonymously are not affected by this breach. This could be true because Quora does not store the identities of people who post anonymous content.
Is my Quora Account Compromised ?.
If you are a registered Quora user, the team is notifying users whose data has been compromised. The best thing that you can do is change the password immediately. Even thought you didn’t receive an email, why not change the password just to be safe ?. While the passwords are encrypted (hashed with a salt that varies for each user), it is generally a best practice not to reuse the same password across multiple services.
