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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[–] scarabic@lemmy.world 2 points 1 year ago

No you can. You just remove the account from the accounts list. It’s labeled “delete this account” which is scary but it just removes it from Memmy. You can add it right back and that logs you back in. Not a great experience.

I sure hope this doesn’t happen a lot. This kind of barrier hurts site growth. I’ve managed a lot of large sites and seen a lot of bugs and when everyone gets logged out there is a measurable impact, and some folks never return. Just look at all the comments here saying “thank I didn’t know to do that.” For every one of those there are 100 people going “huh… Lemmy is down… oh well… on to something else…”