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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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[-] LeHappStick@lemmy.world 9 points 1 year ago

Pardon the ignorance, but how do I know if I was compromised? what do?

[-] Greenbubbleb0y@sh.itjust.works 5 points 1 year ago

What could a hacker even do with your Lemmy info? Unless you are posting critical information about yourself I don't see this as a huge issue. More of a concern for the mod and admin teams imo

[-] LeHappStick@lemmy.world 5 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

Ah okay, I just see ''hacked'' and I freak out every time.

Thank god I used Firefox Relay to mask my true email... and a random password, I'll change it just in case.

Just to clarify... I don't need to delete cookies and sign out of every account on my PC to be safe? me don't understand

[-] Greenbubbleb0y@sh.itjust.works 4 points 1 year ago

The most I see is that they could see your IP address. Not good if you are being stalked. Again I don't think this is a very big deal. If you are worried turn on a VPN.

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

IP addresses aren't logged by Lemmy

[-] 0x4E4F@sh.itjust.works 1 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

Not even in the BE?

And does Lemmy offer this feature, it's just that it's disabled on lemmy.world, or is a feature like this not available at all?

[-] 0x4E4F@sh.itjust.works 1 points 1 year ago

No, just clear cookies for lemmy.world.

[-] 0x4E4F@sh.itjust.works 2 points 1 year ago

They were after admin account info. You can f up a lot of things if you're an admin.

[-] Caminsky@lemmy.world 4 points 1 year ago

You would see an overdraft and a fee charge on your account where you had 37 dollars.

[-] Kissaki@feddit.de 4 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

If you opened an infected page they were able to use your session. That means acting as your account, including seeing and changing your settings. (Which could have allowed them to change your account email or password.)

Nothing beyond that.

[-] IjonTichy@lemmy.ml 3 points 1 year ago

If information is complete, attackers gained access to active user sessions by leaking cookies via script injection, access would have been terminated when the cookies were invalidated. They likely did not have access to your password (changing it never hurts though).