this post was submitted on 08 Apr 2025
453 points (99.3% liked)

Fediverse

32606 readers
1020 users here now

A community to talk about the Fediverse and all it's related services using ActivityPub (Mastodon, Lemmy, KBin, etc).

If you wanted to get help with moderating your own community then head over to !moderators@lemmy.world!

Rules

Learn more at these websites: Join The Fediverse Wiki, Fediverse.info, Wikipedia Page, The Federation Info (Stats), FediDB (Stats), Sub Rehab (Reddit Migration)

founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
ruud@lemmy.world
TragicNotCute@lemmy.world
Xylinna@lemmy.world
MrCenny@lemmy.world
automodbeta@lemmy.world
woelkchen@lemmy.world
453
2 Instances are being used for coordinated vote manipulation, and should be defederated. chinese.lol lemmy.doesnotexist.club (lemmy.asudox.dev)
submitted 5 days ago* (last edited 5 days ago) by asudox@lemmy.asudox.dev to c/fediverse@lemmy.world
64 comments fedilink hide all child comments
 

The attacker seems to be the admin of those two instances. Both instances have their registrations closed.

Edit: It is now open for both of them, or was already. I checked the Fediseer page for both instances and it still says that their registrations are closed.

Though it is suspicious that no captcha, email confirmation or manual approval is required for both of these instances. The admin of lemmy.doesnotexist.club seems to be inactive since their account creation yet this instance is still running. If the admin is the attacker, it could also be that they are the one behind the recent nicole spam.

https://gui.fediseer.com/instances/detail/chinese.lol

https://gui.fediseer.com/instances/detail/lemmy.doesnotexist.club

cross-posted from: https://hackertalks.com/post/8713785

The instances being used are

  • lemmy.doesnotexist.club
  • chinese.lol

Here is an example of the coordinated downvoting https://hackertalks.com/post/8692093

Of course its a controversial user who got someone angry enough to automated downvoting @DonaldJMusk@lemmy.today

But you can see every post they make gets 53ish downvotes from these two instances, plus some organic ones after a few hours.

Current downvoting Accounts

bot-list

LightIsland@chinese.lol MagnificentRow@chinese.lol FondKnowledge@chinese.lol SillyTowel95@chinese.lol HelplessDear@chinese.lol SomberBrain@chinese.lol InexperiencedCloset@chinese.lol NecessaryPerson11@chinese.lol ClosedEmployment@chinese.lol CoarseHair420@chinese.lol BurlyChampionship49@chinese.lol ZigzagNatural@chinese.lol QuestionableDirt@chinese.lol ProudDeparture@lemmy.doesnotexist.club JoyousDouble@chinese.lol UnitedPatience@chinese.lol MajesticArea@lemmy.doesnotexist.club SinfulConference@chinese.lol MoralDivide96@chinese.lol LeadingCarry65@chinese.lol FrillyOpinion38@lemmy.doesnotexist.club LimitedDiscount49@lemmy.doesnotexist.club ForkedScreen@chinese.lol MediumChemistry13@chinese.lol xXxLawfulGrassxXx@lemmy.doesnotexist.club VisibleSentence@chinese.lol AcidicLawyer90@lemmy.doesnotexist.club PriceySink14@lemmy.doesnotexist.club ExcellentBeach@chinese.lol VivaciousNews@lemmy.doesnotexist.club LankyIndependent32@lemmy.doesnotexist.club SpeedyFault@chinese.lol ConcreteHall89@lemmy.doesnotexist.club WorthyPoint12@lemmy.doesnotexist.club SurprisedAdult99@chinese.lol FlashyCrack@lemmy.doesnotexist.club MasculineBeing@chinese.lol RichWeird@lemmy.doesnotexist.club DryCash97@lemmy.doesnotexist.club AuthorizedChair@chinese.lol SlimKiss@lemmy.doesnotexist.club AromaticRoof78@lemmy.doesnotexist.club BewitchedInterview@lemmy.doesnotexist.club ImaginaryDraw@lemmy.doesnotexist.club PertinentGround@chinese.lol SinfulAssumption@lemmy.doesnotexist.club AwkwardAnybody30@lemmy.doesnotexist.club UnwillingRestaurant@lemmy.doesnotexist.club InsubstantialOven@lemmy.doesnotexist.club

A individual user airing their personal biases and manipulating lemmy isn't good for the community, regardless of how you feel about their target. This is a really bad thing (tm)

top 50 comments
sorted by: hot top controversial new old
[–] vk6flab@lemmy.radio 74 points 5 days ago (1 children)

Can your detection method be automated and federated?

I'm asking because this is probably the thin end of the wedge and is likely to increase exponentially, especially since anyone can set up an instance and do whatever they like with it.

[–] asudox@lemmy.asudox.dev 31 points 5 days ago

Wdym. Do you mean how I found out that the attacker was the admin? Yeah sure, you definitely can automate that.

[–] LemUrun@pawb.social 62 points 5 days ago (12 children)

I know one of these instances.

Fuck you, Nicole!

[–] Kecessa@sh.itjust.works 14 points 5 days ago (4 children)

What? She lied to us? 😱

[–] cheese_greater@lemmy.world 9 points 5 days ago

The Liar Who Spammed Me

load more comments (3 replies)
[–] StupidBrotherInLaw@lemmy.world 6 points 5 days ago (3 children)

Don't you besmirch my fediwife's good name!

[–] LemUrun@pawb.social 2 points 4 days ago

Where are your God now?

load more comments (2 replies)
[–] Sammy@lemmy.dbzer0.com 3 points 5 days ago

Stumblechat Room: HELL

load more comments (9 replies)
[–] anarchiddy@lemmy.dbzer0.com 46 points 5 days ago (6 children)

Seems relatively painless to chop those two instances off - chinese.lol has less than 200 users, and I can't even find instance info for doesnotexist.club (coincidence? i think NOT).

I do personally wonder how difficult it is to spin up new instances though. How much effort would it be for them to create a new one and do it again?

I'm actually most concerned with the IP leaking of the fediverse chick posts - hopefully some progress has been made with the IP leaking in auto-loaded external media through DM's

[–] asudox@lemmy.asudox.dev 17 points 5 days ago

Some instances enable the image proxy, which should prevent this.

[–] Admin@startrek.website 5 points 4 days ago (1 children)

How much effort would it be for them to create a new one and do it again?

Minimal, but it is the domain that gets blocked so the attacker would still need to purchase a new domain.

[–] fmstrat@lemmy.nowsci.com 1 points 1 day ago

Not with sub domains.

[–] qaz@lemmy.world 5 points 5 days ago* (last edited 5 days ago)

I checked the images and so far every image I've encountered linked to the users's lemmy instance's pictrs instance, none were hosted through a custom trackable image host.

[–] SorteKanin@feddit.dk 2 points 5 days ago (1 children)

I’m actually most concerned with the IP leaking

I'm curious, what is it about IP leaking that concerns you? I've been thinking about it lately but I have a hard time seeing why it's a problem.

[–] nailbar@sopuli.xyz 2 points 4 days ago

For one, you now know there is someone on the other end, so you can target your attacks instead of trying random ips.

[–] Randelung@lemmy.world 1 points 5 days ago

That's what I'm afraid of. Once some bad actors realize Lemmy is as defenseless as it is, it'll be carnage for a while. The only tool we have is defederation and it's slow and borderline useless against spam or worse.

load more comments (1 replies)
[–] kingofras@lemmy.world 44 points 5 days ago (2 children)

Warned about this 11 days ago. https://lemmy.world/post/27449126

This is still a weakness of the current federation model imo

load more comments (2 replies)
[–] LovableSidekick@lemmy.world 11 points 5 days ago (3 children)

Beats me what anybody would get out of vote manipulation on lemmy - there are no sponsors, no money involved AFAIK. What's the payoff, upvotes?

[–] conditional_soup@lemm.ee 5 points 4 days ago

Pettiness. I guess some people suffer from such extreme grass deficiency that they'll go through all the trouble of setting up bots to do fully automated luxury harassment instead of small-batch hand-raised harassment.

[–] Contramuffin@lemmy.world 3 points 4 days ago (2 children)

The person being downvoted is the mod of c/conservative. I'm guessing this is a political maneuver to bury his posts/bully him off lemmy

[–] Irelephant@lemm.ee 4 points 4 days ago

We don't need bots to do that!

[–] DragonTypeWyvern@midwest.social 1 points 4 days ago

Which one, because all of them have been rightfully conquered for the proletariat other than whatever Universal Monk is getting up to

[–] isles@lemmy.world 3 points 4 days ago

Winning the hearts and minds in a propaganda / information war at relatively low cost

[–] freamon@preferred.social 27 points 5 days ago (1 children)

The attacker seems to be the admin of those two instances. Both instances have their registrations closed.

The alternative theory would be that these instances had open registrations, but rightly closed registration down after the admins noticed the bots. chinese.lol is on 0.18.4 with an admin with a 2 year old account, lemmy.doesnotexist.club has an admin with a 1 year account, and it was also that instance that the 'nicole' person has used before. This downvote attack would need to be a long time in the planning for what you're suggesting to be true.

[–] asudox@lemmy.asudox.dev 12 points 5 days ago* (last edited 5 days ago) (2 children)

Upon inspecting the actual websites, the registrations seem to be actually open for both instances with no email confirmation, captcha or manual approval as one user pointed out. I checked the Fediseer page for these instances. What is the update delay for Fediseer?

[–] db0@lemmy.dbzer0.com 11 points 5 days ago* (last edited 5 days ago)

Should be 12 hours, unless they explicitly prevent us from accessing their nodeinfo. Which now that I think about it, I should probably notify on.

[–] freamon@preferred.social 11 points 5 days ago (2 children)

What is the update delay for Fediseer?

I don't know. It's not something I'm familiar with - it might just default to saying 'closed' if it doesn't have the data.

It's interesting that the obvious bot accounts on those instances were set up in mid-March last year, so I'm guessing that these are somebody's army that they've used before, but overplayed their hand when they turned it on the DonaldJMusk person. The admins can reasonably be blamed for setting up instances with open registrations and no protections and then forgetting about them, but I'd be wary of blaming them for being behind the attack directly. The 'nicole' person is unlikely to have used their own instance - it's probably just someone with the same MO as whoever owns the bots, finding and exploiting vulnerable instances.

load more comments (2 replies)
[–] Grimy@lemmy.world 13 points 5 days ago* (last edited 5 days ago) (1 children)

We need public voting or this will only get worse. It's currently way too easy to manipulate everyone's feed.

[–] fmstrat@lemmy.nowsci.com 1 points 1 day ago (1 children)

What do you mean public voting? Everything in the Fediverse is public. Spin up a server and you can see all votes, even in the UI as an admin. Do you mean for users?

[–] Grimy@lemmy.world 1 points 10 hours ago

Admin only isn't public tbh.

[–] db0@lemmy.dbzer0.com 9 points 5 days ago

Edit: It is now open for both of them, or was already. I checked the Fediseer page for both instances and it still says that their registrations are closed.

Fediseer doesn't check constantly btw.

[–] asudox@lemmy.asudox.dev 5 points 5 days ago

@TomMonkeyMan@chinese.lol @yassinsiouda@lemmy.doesnotexist.club

load more comments
view more: next ›