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Quora, a question and answer platform that seems to have the answers to almost everything, doesn’t have an answer to how its domain got hacked and how the data of almost 100 million users was compromised.
The popular question & answer platform put out a blog post Tuesday morning stating that its website had been hacked and user information like names, email-addresses and hashed/encrypted passwords had been compromised. It is also believed that hackers made off with “data imported from linked networks when authorised by users.”
Since the breach, Quora has been sending a notification via email to all of its affected users stating that they discovered the hack on Friday, 30 November. It does not mention when the actual breach took place. The website also nullified their old passwords forcing users to create new ones.
Quora is one of the largest websites in the world with over 700 million visits per month which can give you a rough idea of the scale of breach that might have happened.
The email from Quora also mentions that it has “retained a leading digital forensics and security firm to assist”them with the investigations.
This breach has left a lot of Quora users perturbed as many of them took to Twitter to vent their frustration. Some are even concerned about the breach.
That said, there is a sigh of relief from many as no financial data is linked to the website. Quora has also acted swiftly and responded to this breach by logging out all of its users thereby forcing them to log in again with fresh passwords.
Since many of the passwords and sensitive user data linked to other accounts has been hacked it is advisable that Quora users immediately change their Facebook and Google passwords just to be on the safe side.
(At The Quint, we question everything. Play an active role in shaping our journalism by becoming a member today.)