Update: Federation and community creation are now back online!
Hey all, there's a hack floating around which spreads via federated comments and steals users' Lemmy auth tokens. Lemmy.world and other large instances have been hacked, so we're taking some precautions until this is fixed:
- We're logging everyone out so that auth tokens reset
- We're closing off federation and community creation until this is patched
FYI, there are no indications that anyone on our instance has been hacked. We did find ten comments with the code injection attack, which we've now scrubbed. But it's very unlikely that this will cause harm at this stage. There are several steps between this and hacking the entire instance. (Also FYI for nontechnical users, the hack affected Lemmy logins and nothing else. Web browsers run all websites in a kind of "jail")
Sorry for the inconvenience – growing pains. Updates to come as we learn more!
Thank you. I was bewildered by the earlier announcement but you have laid it out a lot clearer here.
I'm sorry if my statement cause you any confusion (シ_ _)シ
I'd prefer not to until we install a patch, since the exploit seems viral in nature (compromise one instance, use that to compromise the next, etc). So trusting one is like trusting all
We're testing that in dev so we might refederate later tonight. Or maybe tomorrow
Yep! It's a really obvious one, just escape a bit of user / federation-facing input that wasn't being escaped. 5-10 lines of code or something.