this post was submitted on 10 Jul 2023
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Lemmy.World Announcements

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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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[–] TheFonz@lemmy.world 4 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Seem to have a hard time loging in

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[–] zaggynl@lemmy.world 4 points 1 year ago

That explains why I had to clear my browser cache, I was unable to login until I did.

[–] PolarBone@lemmy.world 4 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

I’ve been unable to login on desktop since this happened. Only been able to login via Memmy on IOS.

I put in my info and it kicks me back to the front page and doesn’t log me in.

I’ve tried clearing cache too

EDIT: Switching browser to Edge seemed to let me. Weird. Even reinstalled Firefox and still won't let me.

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[–] ludw@lemmy.world 4 points 1 year ago (1 children)

A lot of images seems to be gone from posts in /c/pics is this related to the hack or the cleanup after?

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[–] ruins__jokes@lemmy.world 4 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Not too promising, hopefully it's fixed quickly.

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[–] NausetJF@lemmy.world 3 points 1 year ago (1 children)

I appreciate the transparency. Hopefully with more eyes on the source code hacks like this will not happen again.

[–] fenwickrysen@lemmy.world 3 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Just for a bit of perspective -- Scary hacks like this happen all the time in the for-profit corporate world, too. They just don't tell us about it. It will continue to happen as technology constantly grows and evolves.

Praise to the Admins and Devs who play this constant game of whack-a-mole!

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[–] JohnDolt@lemmy.world 3 points 1 year ago

Good shit! Thanks for keeping things up and the pretty quick response as well.

[–] binary45@lemmy.world 3 points 1 year ago (2 children)

Is that why I got logged off?

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[–] dreadedsemi@lemmy.world 3 points 1 year ago

I hope devs will examine all parts of the code that display content to make sure proper sanitization

[–] Tom2day@lemmy.world 3 points 1 year ago (3 children)

Hmm. Liftoff won't let me post but shows logged in and as a newbie be damned if I can find where to log out.

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[–] Magiwarriorx@lemmy.world 3 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Is it possible cookies for other websites were scraped? I was logged in to .world at the time; I have logged out of all accounts, and reset passwords as a precaution, but want to know if I should be on the lookout from this.

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[–] Molecular0079@lemmy.world 3 points 1 year ago

Thanks for the post-mortem and the quick fix! Glad you guys around to help battle test Lemmy's code.

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