Quora Hacked, causes Data exposure from 100m-or-so End-User Accounts

The Internet has just had a success such as of Quora albeit unnoticed. The forum rarely hits the headlines even as it maintains a massive archive of information online. After Wikipedia, it is Quora that is now prominent in news, however sadly, not quite favorably. That's because its end-user data has been hacked resulting in leakage of information belonging to about 100m account holders that some illegitimate third-party stole.

Founder and chief executive officer of the forum Adam d'Angelo, who was previously chief technology officer at Facebook, stated that the account data leaked consisted of end-users' names, encrypted passcodes, electronic mail ids and information acquired from associated sources that the account owners authorized. The leaked data also included end-users' Internet Protocol addresses that were registered with Quora. As a result, end-users have been advised to reset their Quora passwords which might be the same as for other websites. Actually, user passwords for every website should be unique so that any breach's impact on the consumers is minimum.

The Quora breach came to be noticed on 30th November after which the forum notified law enforcement authorities while engaged certain security consulting and digital forensics firm for determining the details of the incident. Www.bleepingcomputer.com posted this on the Web dated December 3, 2018.

Entering news headlines, the Quora incident is a new and major hacking case on the Web. It's not at the moment clear what way the attacker managed acquiring admission into the company's systems. Quora is already sending its affected account owners e-mails containing more or less the same information that was earlier provided.

Adam d'Angelo expressed his regrets following the hack, as well as admitted Quora's failure in maintaining the utmost security of its end-users' data. He said the company recognized its responsibility for maintaining end-users' trust for which it required working extremely hard and ensuring such an incident didn't occur again.

Truth is that there is no respite in hacking attempts with a few more effective compared to others. And still, in spite of their frequent occurrences, Web surfers continue to hold onto poor security measures, while still poorer security practices.

» SPAMfighter News - 12/7/2018