this post was submitted on 10 Jul 2023
3291 points (99.3% liked)

Lemmy.World Announcements

30372 readers
2 users here now

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

Follow us for server news 🐘

Outages πŸ”₯

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 πŸ’—

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
ruud@lemmy.world
lwadmin@lemmy.world
lwCET@lemmy.world
jelloeater85@lemmy.world
Serinus@lemmy.world
lw_mod_notification@lemmy.world
Thekingoflorda@lemmy.world
3291
Lemmy.world (and some others) were hacked (lemmy.world)
submitted 2 years ago* (last edited 2 years ago) by ruud@lemmy.world to c/lemmyworld@lemmy.world
723 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 8) 50 comments
sorted by: hot top controversial new old
[–] ReepusVanguard@lemmy.dbzer0.com 3 points 2 years ago (1 children)

My main is locked up and it sucks, i hope this all gets fixed.

load more comments (1 replies)
[–] Jakdracula@lemmy.world 3 points 2 years ago (1 children)

I’d like to logout, then log back in, because I can’t upvote / downvote- how do I logout? I can’t seem to find a logout button.

[–] ChickenWings@lemmy.world 2 points 2 years ago (3 children)

Are you on the web or an app?

I'm using Liftoff app, and I had to clear my storage and cache to log out.

load more comments (3 replies)
[–] daniskarma@lemmy.world 3 points 2 years ago

Thanks for the quick response! This admin team rules!

[–] NausetJF@lemmy.world 3 points 2 years 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 2 years 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!

load more comments (1 replies)
[–] Nomadic@lemmy.world 2 points 2 years ago

Maybe there needs to be a quick rundown how to actually log out and in on clients, seems you can't with jerboa without just wiping the app, and wefwef, you need to delete all accounts.

I see some instances are throwing server errors

[–] medvedev@lemmy.world 2 points 2 years ago

thanks to admin team for resolving that quickly

[–] gabriele97@lemmy.g97.top 2 points 2 years ago (1 children)

How are you preventing it to happen again until a patch is released from devs?

load more comments (1 replies)
[–] mourkeer@lemmy.world 2 points 2 years ago (1 children)

I lost some of my post history. Is there a data issue that's come from this? Why are my comments gone?

[–] pgetsos@kbin.social 2 points 2 years ago (1 children)

If it is only recent post history, maybe it was purged along with many malicious comments/posts

[–] mourkeer@lemmy.world 2 points 2 years ago

I know but this was over a week of comments lost.

[–] Tom2day@lemmy.world 2 points 2 years ago

Thanks.

[–] Rooki@lemmy.world 2 points 2 years ago* (last edited 2 years ago) (1 children)

Is there a rough time range when it happened? and any news about other big instances like lemmy.ml? Are those safe? Currently they are not on the same version as lemmy.world.

[–] henfredemars@infosec.pub 3 points 2 years ago

2:11 UTC is my first record of the event taking place, but keep in mind the attacker could have injected code long before without noticeable impacts. There's no way to be completely certain they didn't steal tokens and access accounts before they made themselves known.

[–] sheetmysharts@lemmy.world 2 points 2 years ago

Thanks to everyone involved for the quick response πŸ‘

[–] TrismegistusMx@lemmy.world 2 points 2 years ago (4 children)

Is this why I can't log in on Chrome? I switched to Firefox and it worked.

load more comments (4 replies)
[–] ninekeysdown@lemmy.world 2 points 2 years ago

Great job everyone! Keep it up! Love the transparency!

[–] jpants@lemmy.fmhy.ml 2 points 2 years ago

I see you, Imposter.

load more comments
view more: β€Ή prev next β€Ί