Quora Website Reports Data Leak of Some 100 Million Users
Data of approximately 100 million Quora users may have been leaked after the security breach, the Q&A website said on Tuesday.
"For approximately 100 million Quora users, the following information may have been compromised: account information ... public content and actions ... non-public content and actions," Quora CEO Adam D'Angelo said on the company's blog.
According to the statement, the company has already taken steps to contain the incident, protect its users, and prevent this type of breach from happening in the future.
"On Friday (November 30) we discovered that some user data was compromised by a third party who gained unauthorized access to our systems. 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," the company said.
According to Quora, most of the leaked information was in the public domain.
Earlier this year, several similar data breaches occurred.
In March, US company Under Armour revealed a cybersecurity breach of its diet and fitness tracking app MyFitnessPal, which affected approximately 150 million users. The hackers gained access to user Names, email addresses, and hashed passwords.
In June, security researcher Vinny Troia discovered that a database with personal information of 340 million individuals, compiled by marketing and data aggregation firm Exactis for confidential usage, has been leaked. The leak happened because the company was storing the data on a publicly accessible server that was not protected.
One of the most significant data breaches in recent months was the massive leak of the login information, dates of birth and other personal data of Facebook users that was reported in October. The social network said that 30 million accounts were affected, but that personal data was acquired from only half of them.
The statistics provided by the Breach Level Index revealed that since 2013, more than 13 billion data records have been stolen, with 4,316 records being stolen every minute.