Quora says 100 million user accounts may have been hacked giving out passwords, e-mails in massive data breach

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Quora says 100 million user accounts may have been hacked giving out passwords, e-mails in massive data breach

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  • The question-answer platform, Quora, on Monday, said that account data of over 100 million users on the platform may have been compromised, giving unauthorised access to a ‘malicious third-party.’
  • The hackers possibly accessed user information such as encrypted passwords, e-mail address, among other private information.
  • Quora is notifying the affected accounts and invalidating their log-in details as a cautionary measure.
In a massive data breach, question-answer platform Quora has said a ‘malicious third party’ may have gained unauthorised access to personal information of over 100 million users.

On Monday, the company announced in a blog post that it discovered the data breach on Friday. access to Quora’s internal system on Friday.

The company is “still investigating the precise causes” and is notifying affected users over e-mail and logging them out, along with asking them to change passwords. The platform has already invalidated old passwords.

The leaked information includes user user names, e-mail addresses, encrypted passwords, data imported from linked networks, non-public content and actions including answer requests, downvotes, and direct messages of certain users.

Like many other digital platforms Quora links account information of users to other social networking sites such Twitter and Facebook, for log-in purposes, and this breach is the latest incident to show the potential risks of websites sharing user information with third parties. The incident is among the largest reported data breaches this year.
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“We're very sorry for any concern or inconvenience this may cause,” Adam D'Angelo, CEO of Quora, said in the post, adding it is the company’s responsibility to make sure things like this don’t happen and that it “failed to meet that responsibility.”

Read D'Angelo’s full blog post here.

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