Quora Says Data Breach May Have Affected 100 Million Users

Quora, a popular question-and-answer website founded by former Facebook employees, said Monday that hackers may have stolen data belonging to approximately 100 million users.

The Mountain View, Calif.-based company behind the site, which is still investigating the causes of the data breach, said in a blog post that on Friday it “discovered that some user data was compromised by a third party who gained unauthorized access to one of our systems.”

Quora said data that may have been compromised included account information such as names, email addresses as well as encrypted (hashed) passwords and data imported from linked networks when authorized by users; public content and actions (questions, answers, comments, upvotes); and non-public content and actions (answer requests, downvotes and direct messages).

The company said in the blog post that it’s in the process of notifying users whose data has been compromised and is “logging out all Quora users who may have been affected, and, if they use a password as their authentication method, we are invalidating their passwords. “

Quora said that it’s retained “a leading digital forensics and security firm to assist us. We have also notified law enforcement officials.”

“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,” the company said.

The Quora data breach is one of a string of recent breaches that include incidents involving Marriott International’s Starwood guest reservation database impacting 500 million guests as well as one Dell Technologies, in which the company said it detected and disrupted unauthorized activity on its network attempting to extract customer information from Dell.com.

Quora was founded in 2009 by former Facebook employees Adam D'Angelo and Charlie Cheever. The company has raised a total of $226 million in funding, according to Crunchbase.