Question-and-answer website Quora has admitted compromising of its user data.
The company said investigations are on while it would ensure appropriate steps to prevent such incidents in future.
“We recently discovered that some user data was compromised as a result of unauthorized access to our systems by a malicious third party,” Quora said in a security update.
The popular website apologized to users, saying “sorry for any concern or inconvenience this may cause.”
What happened
On November 30, Quora discovered that some user data was compromised by a third party who gained unauthorized access to its systems.
Precise causes could not be immediately confirmed following which the company engaged a leading digital forensics and security firm to assist in investigations.
“While the investigation is still ongoing, we have already taken steps to contain the incident, and our efforts to protect our users and prevent this type of incident from happening in the future are our top priority as a company,” Quora said.
It was Quora’s responsibility to ensure that things like this don’t happen at its platform, and it failed to meet that responsibility
What information was involved
The following information of yours may have been compromised:
- Account and user information, e.g. name, email, IP, user ID, encrypted password, user account settings, personalization data.
- Public actions and content including drafts, e.g. questions, answers, comments, blog posts, upvotes.
- Data imported from linked networks when authorized by you, e.g. contacts, demographic information, interests, access tokens (now invalidated).
What Quora is doing
- While investigation continues, the company is taking additional steps to improve its security.
- It is notifying users whose data has been compromised.
- Out of an abundance of caution, it is logging out all Quora users who may have been affected, and, if they use a password as their authentication method, the company is invalidating their passwords.
What you can do
It is recommended that you change your passwords if you are on this question-and-answer website.
Quora says it’s a place to share knowledge and better understand the world. In order to maintain that trust, the company needs to work very hard to make sure this does not happen again.
Quora is a Q&A platform that empowers people to share and grow the world’s knowledge. People come to Quora to ask questions about any subject, read high quality knowledge that’s personalized and relevant to them, and share their own knowledge with others.
California-based Quora was founded in 2009 by Adam D’Angelo and Charlie Cheever, both former Facebook employees.
