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

submitted 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) by ruud@lemmy.world to c/lemmyworld@lemmy.world

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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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[-] hawkwind@lemmy.management 19 points 1 year ago

Out of curiosity, where would the regulators go for a case like this? There's no "company" running it per. se.

[-] linearchaos@lemmy.world 27 points 1 year ago

It seems the general consensus is GDPR applies even to OSS non company entities, but it would appear that there's very little being done to honor it.

https://www.zwilnik.com/better-social-media/activitypub-conference-2019/oss-compliance-with-privacy-by-default-and-design/#:~:text=Although%20GDPR%20directly%20applies%20only,sysadmins%2C%20including%20in%20the%20Fediverse.

This article outlines Fediverse and responsibilities, I think it mostly requires someone to file a lawsuit before there's any action.

In another case a man had cameras in his back yard that could also see a public area and was fined and forced to move them.

https://www.termsfeed.com/blog/gdpr-exemptions/

Mainly it just seems to be fodder to be used in lawsuits to make people comply with others security wishes. Not certain how all that works since cities are covered in public cameras.

[-] trouser_mouse@lemmy.world 12 points 1 year ago

I am not sure how a platform like this will work with GDPR - each server will be responsible themselves, but how it works with the flow of data between servers and who the regulators would have cases against - I think that is to be tested at some point.