Personal information of over 100 million Quora users including their name, email address and encrypted passwords were stolen. Notably, the shocking revelation was made by the California-based popular question-and-answer platform itself.
In a blog post, Quora CEO Adam D’Angelo said, “Questions and answers that were written anonymously are not affected by this breach as we do not store the identities of people who post anonymous content.”
“We’re still investigating the precise causes and in addition to the work being conducted by our internal security teams, we have retained a leading digital forensics and security firm to assist us. We have also notified law enforcement officials,” D’Angelo wrote.
“We are working rapidly to investigate the situation further and take the appropriate steps to prevent such incidents in the future. We’re very sorry for any concern or inconvenience this may cause,” he concluded.
Importantly, Quora discovered the breach on November 30. It found that some user data was compromised by a third party who gained unauthorised access to one of its systems. Quora was founded by D’Angelo, a former Chief Technology Officer at Facebook, in 2009. The Mountain View, California-headquartered company has over 300 million monthly unique visitors.
Also Read: Ryan, eight-year-old YouTuber makes Rs 150 crore in one year