this post was submitted on 10 Jul 2023
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While I was asleep, apparently the site was hacked. Luckily, (big) part of the lemmy.world team is in US, and some early birds in EU also helped mitigate this.

As I am told, this was the issue:

  • There is an vulnerability which was exploited
  • Several people had their JWT cookies leaked, including at least one admin
  • Attackers started changing site settings and posting fake announcements etc

Our mitigations:

  • We removed the vulnerability
  • Deleted all comments and private messages that contained the exploit
  • Rotated JWT secret which invalidated all existing cookies

The vulnerability will be fixed by the Lemmy devs.

Details of the vulnerability are here

Many thanks for all that helped, and sorry for any inconvenience caused!

Update While we believe the admins accounts were what they were after, it could be that other users accounts were compromised. Your cookie could have been 'stolen' and the hacker could have had access to your account, creating posts and comments under your name, and accessing/changing your settings (which shows your e-mail).

For this, you would have had to be using lemmy.world at that time, and load a page that had the vulnerability in it.

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[โ€“] [email protected] 26 points 1 year ago (20 children)

I think this is a strong reminder: We shouldn't put all our eggs in one basket. This will happen again. Unlike Reddit, we don't need to concentrate all communities on one instance. We should all make an effort to spread out. Some other general use instances are:

Again, for those new, you can post content to any of these instances and interact with content from other instances at the same time, just like you can send an email from your Gmail account to your ProtonMail account.

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[โ€“] [email protected] 24 points 1 year ago (4 children)

So, do we change passwords, esp those who logged on during the attack? (I created this acct right before the attack happened tho.)

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[โ€“] [email protected] 24 points 1 year ago

Despite the fact that Lemmy is a fairly new piece of software, which makes these issues more likely, I am really grateful for it being open source, and I really appreciate this level of transparency.

[โ€“] [email protected] 24 points 1 year ago

Well done all involved. Sounds like it was caught and mitigated quickly

[โ€“] [email protected] 22 points 1 year ago (2 children)

Thank you for the transparency and swift solution!

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[โ€“] [email protected] 21 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Any truth to what I've heard this may have been done by a group we defederated with?

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[โ€“] [email protected] 20 points 1 year ago

Thanks for fixing and being so open about it

[โ€“] [email protected] 18 points 1 year ago

Good job. I don't understand very much of that, so that makes me all the more grateful. Thank you.

[โ€“] [email protected] 18 points 1 year ago (9 children)

How does this impact those using mobile apps like Jerboa or Liftoff, instead of the website directly?

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[โ€“] [email protected] 17 points 1 year ago (3 children)

I just disabled whole "/admin" section on my instance and added nice message ๐Ÿ˜†

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[โ€“] [email protected] 16 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Thanks for the transparancy about this.

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[โ€“] [email protected] 16 points 1 year ago

The quick fix is much appreciated, thank you and everyone that helped for your hard work!

[โ€“] [email protected] 16 points 1 year ago (8 children)

On Liftoff, I had to clear cache and storage in order to log back in. Still having issues with the website on Chrome, which keeps telling me I'm not logged in after clearing cache and logging back in.

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[โ€“] [email protected] 16 points 1 year ago

Thanks for your efforts. I know that Lemmy was put in place rather quickly as a Reddit alternative. But I'm genuinely hopeful that this will be a good alternative.

[โ€“] [email protected] 16 points 1 year ago (2 children)

At least now we can mark off the "disruptive website defacement attack" line on the checklist of (relatively) new website growing pains. Better to have them make lots of noise and get fixed quickly than quietly do sneaky things in the background.

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