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ITACS 5211: Introduction to Ethical Hacking

Wade Mackey

SECURITY NEWS THIS WEEK: DID QUORA GET HACKED? TOP ANSWER: YES

December 15, 2018 by Connor Fairman Leave a Comment

Quora recently acknowledged that they were hacked by a malicious third party. In a classic tale, user data was stolen through a breach. Quora has alerted the authorities. The breach has implications for around 100 million users:

  • Account information, e.g. name, email address, encrypted password (hashed using bcrypt with a salt that varies for each user), data imported from linked networks when authorized by users
  • Public content and actions, e.g. questions, answers, comments, upvotes
  • Non-public content and actions, e.g. answer requests, downvotes, direct messages (note that a low percentage of Quora users have sent or received such messages)

One interesting find here in my opinion is that Quora uses bcrypt to encrypt passwords. That’s a pretty standard way that people do it when they build apps. That’s how I encrypted user passwords this summer at my internship. I guess I expected Quora to have maybe a proprietary way of encrypting passwords. Maybe bcrypt is just that good. I don’t know.

https://blog.quora.com/Quora-Security-Update

Filed Under: Week 14: Review of all topics Tagged With:

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  • Uncategorized (14)
  • Week 01: Overview (7)
  • Week 02: TCP/IP and Network Architecture (18)
  • Week 03: Reconnaisance (17)
  • Week 04: Vulnerability Scanning (19)
  • Week 05: System and User Enumeration (17)
  • Week 06: Sniffers (17)
  • Week 07: NetCat and HellCat (15)
  • Week 08: Social Engineering, Encoding and Encryption (21)
  • Week 09: Malware (14)
  • Week 10: Web Application Hacking (17)
  • Week 11: SQL Injection (15)
  • Week 12: Web Services (25)
  • Week 13: Evasion Techniques (8)
  • Week 14: Review of all topics (15)

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