Hackers Broke Password Hashes & Stole Data Of Near 100 Million Quora Users

Adm Desk Dec 07, 2018

“Quora says hackers stole data of up to 100 million users.” – These words are enough to state that a large number of Quora users’ information is not in safe hands now.

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Security and privacy of data are at stake for Quora users! Shocked! In that case, you are not the one only who has been shocked and affected. There is rest out of 100 million users apart from you who have been affected by the data breaching experience.

Though, it is already confirmed that near 100 million users’ data was hacked from question and answer site of repute, Quora.com. Users, who are affected by the scenario, certainly have received the email from Quora already with the request to change their passwords.

Data includes full name of users, email addresses, encrypted passwords, non-public content, messages, answer requests, down votes along with comments – that have been stolen by hackers. Truly, it is not at all good news for Quora users.

By Now Steps Taken By Quora to Handle Data Breach Issue

This is not the first time that the team of hackers affected the privacy policy of a site of repute like Quora.com. The data breaching incident already had wrecked the reputation of Facebook earlier. Near 30 million users of Facebook had been affected by this data breaching system. Moving back to the present scenario, Quora officials have already employed digital forensics and security team to look into the matter, and they have informed the news of breach to the law enforcement officials by now.

How to Break the One Way Hash Function?

Yes, such incident was not expected from Quora. Adam D’Angelo – CEO of Quora has admitted their incapability to protect data of users and they have taken responsibility to compensate the situation.

Still, it is the responsibility of users to protect their data, password, content and question and answers from third-party/intruder access. Let us see how you can at least try to shield your Quora account information and activities from hackers/intruders,

Do not set same password for different sites.
Create long, strong and complex password for your Quora account.
Use password manager to set and use unique password for each site you access time and again.
Avail the multi-factor authentication to protect your password and account privacy.
Do not share your password and account details with a person you cannot trust or you are not known to him.
Change your password time and again to make it unbreakable.

Breaking the password is nothing but to break the hash functions for the hackers. If a specific hash function is used to make password then hackers can break the hash function in utilizing their off-the-shelf hardware function and widely used list of word just in a little span of time. It becomes easy for them to break the hash function in a day or two and breach data.

Last but not the least,

According to sources, Quora has already changed the policy to protect data of users. They have taken the bcrypt function to shield data from malicious hackers. The function is not only expensive but also time taking to decode the hashes into the plaintext.

Hence, it will be quite tough for hackers to break the hash function. As bycrypt function prevents huge percentage of hashes to be deciphered into plaintext.

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