Question: What Happened?
Answer: Hackers Stole 100 Million Quora Users’ Data!
The world’s most popular question and answer open forum was recently hacked, resulting in 100 million users being exposed to an unknown hacker group that now has control over an enormous amount of sensitive information. Quora announced the data breach last week and discovered that the unknown hacker group managed to gain unauthorized access to their network and stole nearly half of their entire user base.
According to Adam D’Angelo, the chief executive officer and co-founder of Quora, the personal user information compromised in the breach includes:
- Account information, such as names, email addresses, encrypted (hashed) passwords, and data imported from linked social networks like Facebook and Twitter when authorized by users.
- Public content and actions, like questions, answers, comments, and upvotes.
- Non-public content and actions, including answer requests, downvotes, direct and messages (note that a low percentage of Quora users have sent or received such messages).
Although question-answer internet company made a point to explain that they hash out passwords and sensitive information to ensure cybercriminals cannot crack their systems, they doubled down and logged all exposed users out of their accounts and forced them to reset their passwords.
Evolve MGA offers cyber insurance that covers policyholders in the event their cloud data is hacked, lost, or stolen. Get appointed with our cyber insurance specialists for a FREE Quote!
If you’d like to read more about this massive data breach, click here.