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submitted 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) by ruud@lemmy.world to c/lemmyworld@lemmy.world

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.

(page 2) 24 comments
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[-] FartsWithAnAccent@lemmy.world 0 points 1 year ago

Damn, I go to bed early and I miss everything! Thanks for the quick resolution and transparent disclosure, this place is great!

[-] RealFknNito@lemmy.world -2 points 1 year ago

Don't worry, all you missed was a lemonparty redirect and some weird picture of some guy's face and a caption. It was just some basic disruption, glad the staff resolved it quickly though.

[-] null@zerobytes.monster 0 points 1 year ago

I just disabled whole "/admin" section on my instance and added nice message ๐Ÿ˜†

[-] AlmightySnoo@lemmy.world 0 points 1 year ago

I would put a link to ๐Ÿ‹๐ŸŽ‰ porn disguised as a "go to admin panel" link for them there

[-] null@zerobytes.monster -1 points 1 year ago

Updated it little bit, probably later add some "nice" links too ๐Ÿ˜‚

[-] gnarly@lemmy.world 0 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

Had to clear my browser catch to log in, Jerboa still shows as not logged in even after logging out which you do by clicking the hamburger menu then click the top banner to change/log out of accounts. This post is a test to see if my account works again via browser lol.

Edit: clearing app data/cache for Jerboa fixed the login issue.

[-] RealFknNito@lemmy.world -2 points 1 year ago

Thanks for this comment, I had to wipe cache and cookies to login on desktop. Wasn't sure what was preventing me from logging in.

[-] sma3in@lemmy.world -1 points 1 year ago

that is why I got logged off from my account this morning!! impressed by the rapid intervention!! Good job lemmy team!

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

Good thing we all use randomly generated passwords for every account and always remember to change them every few months.

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[-] Uncle_Iroh@lemmy.world -3 points 1 year ago

You guys are quick!

[-] betterdeadthanreddit@lemmy.world -5 points 1 year ago

At least now we can mark off the "disruptive website defacement attack" line on the checklist of (relatively) new website growing pains. Better to have them make lots of noise and get fixed quickly than quietly do sneaky things in the background.

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this post was submitted on 10 Jul 2023
135 points (97.9% liked)

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