Adam D’Angelo, the Quora CEO apologized after hackers stole personal information of over 100 million users of this most renowned Q&A platform. The hacked personal information includes usernames, email addresses, and their encrypted passwords. The security breach was discovered by Quora on November 30. The company confirmed that the breach was performed as a result of unauthorized access of one of its systems by a “malicious third party”. On Monday, Mr. D’Angelo wrote in his blog post that “It is our responsibility to make sure things like this don’t happen, and we failed to meet that responsibility.”
The former Chief Technology Officer at Facebook Inc, Adam D’Angelo founded Quora in 2009. The Mountain View, California-headquartered Q&A platform soon catches the fame and now has over 300 million monthly unique visitors. The company is already in the process of sending email to compromised users and logging out all Quora users who may have been affected. Mr. D’Angelo further mentioned “We believe we’ve identified the root cause and taken steps to address the issue, although our investigation is ongoing and we’ll continue to make security improvements. 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.”
Quora’s data breach is one of the latest series of high profile hacks. Last week, renowned global hotel chain The Marriott revealed that its guest reservation system was hacked, exposing 500 million guest data near hackers. Quora users are requested to change their account passwords if they have used the same password for other accounts as their Quora account. Still, no financial information is exposed to the user data breach.