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

This is a great thing, but mass adoption should still be refrained from

Mass adoption would be great as long as it happens naturally over time, and not a result of the "we must grow" mentality of Silicon Valley.

Like Reddit, the massive "default" areas would be fairly low quality, with the culture being a reflection of the broader population. But the smaller specialized communities would be beacons of light for people looking for nuanced conversation.

With the way the fediverse is structured, the negative aspects of mass adoption would be simpler to avoid, simply by curating an instance to show content from the communities you're interested in.

I can't think of a better omen for the future of the free internet, than to have most people using a FOSS social media site as their primary online hub. It would certainly be better than allowing all online communication to be controlled by a handful of billionaires with goals that are harmful to society.

But again, this needs to happen naturally, by virtue of Lemmy just being a great place to share content, and without the goal of simply making the most money possible.