this post was submitted on 10 Jul 2023
2929 points (99.3% liked)

Lemmy.World Announcements

29077 readers
136 users here now

This Community is intended for posts about the Lemmy.world server by the admins.

Follow us for server news ๐Ÿ˜

Outages ๐Ÿ”ฅ

https://status.lemmy.world/

For support with issues at Lemmy.world, go to the Lemmy.world Support community.

Support e-mail

Any support requests are best sent to info@lemmy.world e-mail.

Report contact

Donations ๐Ÿ’—

If you would like to make a donation to support the cost of running this platform, please do so at the following donation URLs.

If you can, please use / switch to Ko-Fi, it has the lowest fees for us

Ko-Fi (Donate)

Bunq (Donate)

Open Collective backers and sponsors

Patreon

Join the team

founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
 

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
sorted by: hot top controversial new old
[โ€“] godless@lemmy.world 7 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.

load more comments (2 replies)
[โ€“] Reliant1087@lemmy.world 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?

[โ€“] xylogx@lemmy.world 6 points 1 year ago (2 children)

I noticed this morning for a small amount of my posts with pictures, maybe 5-10%, the pictures were deleted or missing. Not sure if this is related to the incident.

load more comments (2 replies)
[โ€“] aussiematt@lemm.ee 6 points 1 year ago (2 children)

It seems there is no way in Lemmy to invalidate all your session cookies? Without that, how can you secure an account which has a stolen session cookie?

load more comments (2 replies)
[โ€“] SnowGlobal@lemmy.world 6 points 1 year ago

Excellent, thanks for the quick response ruud and admins.

[โ€“] TheVampireSaga@lemmy.world 6 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

Here's a relevant post that talked about this with @AlmightySnoo@lemmy.world 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.

[โ€“] WhoRoger@lemmy.world 6 points 1 year ago (1 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.

[โ€“] woelkchen@lemmy.world 8 points 1 year ago (3 children)

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

This one: https://lemmy.world/u/LMAO

load more comments (3 replies)
[โ€“] DarkSpectrum@lemmy.world 5 points 1 year ago

Had to re-login in the Connect app

load more comments
view more: โ€น prev next โ€บ