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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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[-] MigratingtoLemmy@lemmy.world 1 points 1 year ago

I have no idea why you got down voted, but you're right

[-] vacuumflower@lemmy.sdf.org 3 points 1 year ago

Well, I honestly in a way write such comments in a tone more likely to irritate people. Maybe not consciously. I just happen to have grown in a family and in groups where disagreeing and arguing was not considered disrespectful, and I am ironically not very tolerant to the other way of looking at this.

(Should think about this more often when I want to complain about life - some people were not that lucky.)

[-] DreadTowel@lemmy.world 1 points 1 year ago

Seems that a chunk of this platform's userbase are people generally angry at the establishment who upvote everything that wants to bring it down and downvote everything that rejects the idea. Happy that there's many reasonable people here too :)

[-] vacuumflower@lemmy.sdf.org 1 points 1 year ago

I'm generally angry at the establishment too, it's just that I see that establishment being pretty friendly to leftist ideas on economics in everything but direct admission of it.