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.

  • Greenbubbleb0y
    link
    fedilink
    arrow-up
    5
    ·
    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
      link
      fedilink
      arrow-up
      5
      ·
      edit-2
      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
        link
        fedilink
        arrow-up
        4
        ·
        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.

          • 0x4E4F
            link
            fedilink
            arrow-up
            1
            ·
            edit-2
            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
        link
        fedilink
        arrow-up
        1
        ·
        1 year ago

        No, just clear cookies for lemmy.world.

    • 0x4E4F
      link
      fedilink
      arrow-up
      2
      ·
      1 year ago

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