this post was submitted on 10 Jul 2023

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Lemmy.world (and some others) were hacked (lemmy.world)

submitted 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

718 comments fedilink hide all child comments

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.

(page 4) 50 comments

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[–] [email protected] 9 points 1 year ago (11 children)

Pardon the ignorance, but how do I know if I was compromised? what do?

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[–] [email protected] 9 points 1 year ago (4 children)

Interesting.

Attackers started changing site settings and posting fake announcements etc

So at least that wasn't 100% malicious, otherwise they could've kept the vuln hidden and just collect data and whatnot.

On the other hand, who cared enough about Lemmy to hack it? Weird.

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[–] [email protected] 8 points 1 year ago (2 children)

With the JWT secret rotation, shouldn't everyone be forced to re-login? I'm posting with my existing session without any changes.

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[–] [email protected] 8 points 1 year ago (2 children)

Thanks for the transparency. Was having issues with Lemmy, now seems everything back to normal. Got a question, Just to add an extra layer of security, Do i need to use ToR or VPN with Lemmy ?

[–] [email protected] 6 points 1 year ago

That wouldn't have helped. Don't consider this a secure messaging platform, or use this to communicate banking details or something.

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[–] [email protected] 8 points 1 year ago

Rock on, Rudd.

[–] [email protected] 8 points 1 year ago (2 children)

If I'm not from lemmy.world and visited a lemmy.world community via my home instance, does the hacker gain access to my account?

If I, while logged in to my home instance, accessed lemmy.world in another tab, does the hacker gain access to my account?

Does this hack infect devices used to access lemmy.world?

Sorry for noob questions, I'm just worried.

[–] [email protected] 9 points 1 year ago

afaik, exploit does not pass through federation. but you should change your password just in case.

it doesn't and probably cannot infect your device

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[–] [email protected] 8 points 1 year ago

Must have been jealous spez

[–] [email protected] 6 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

Here's a relevant post that talked about this with @[email protected] I think is worth looking into for anyone curious what exactly happened.

https://sh.itjust.works/post/923025

please don't visit the legal section of the website or anything confirmed compromised if anything.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 1 year ago

Excellent, thanks for the quick response ruud and admins.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 1 year ago

Thank you for taking the time to update this :) Hope everything will be sorted out without people being scared. As a layman, was any user data compromised?

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