2883
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.

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[-] PagingDoctorLove@lemmy.world 23 points 1 year ago

Can I ask some possibly dumb questions?

  1. What is JWT?
  2. Was any private user data compromised, and if so will users be informed?
  3. Is there anything regular users can do to avoid their data being compromised? For example, not accessing lemmy on certain web browsers?

Thank you!

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[-] Nugget@lemmy.world 22 points 1 year ago

I think this is a strong reminder: We shouldn't put all our eggs in one basket. This will happen again. Unlike Reddit, we don't need to concentrate all communities on one instance. We should all make an effort to spread out. Some other general use instances are:

Again, for those new, you can post content to any of these instances and interact with content from other instances at the same time, just like you can send an email from your Gmail account to your ProtonMail account.

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[-] brittleback@lemmy.world 22 points 1 year ago

Well done all involved. Sounds like it was caught and mitigated quickly

[-] nonagonOrc@lemmy.world 22 points 1 year ago

Thank you for the transparency and swift solution!

[-] ihavenopeopleskills@kbin.social 15 points 1 year ago

Vulnerability strikes. Open source's lightning response strikes back. Again.

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[-] wee_butterfly@lemmy.world 21 points 1 year ago

Any truth to what I've heard this may have been done by a group we defederated with?

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[-] betterdeadthanreddit@lemmy.world 20 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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[-] null@zerobytes.monster 19 points 1 year ago

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

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[-] Notsosupermario@lemmy.world 17 points 1 year ago

Thanks for fixing and being so open about it

[-] jarfil@lemmy.ml 15 points 1 year ago

How does this impact those using mobile apps like Jerboa or Liftoff, instead of the website directly?

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[-] gsdsam@lemmy.world 15 points 1 year ago

Could admins sign announcements with a PGP key to mitigate false admin posts and the consequences this might have? Or is this no longer necessary?

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[-] Alivrah@lemmy.world 15 points 1 year ago

The quick fix is much appreciated, thank you and everyone that helped for your hard work!

[-] dr_scientist@lemmy.world 14 points 1 year ago

Good job. I don't understand very much of that, so that makes me all the more grateful. Thank you.

[-] hal_5700X@lemmy.world 13 points 1 year ago

Thanks for the transparancy about this.

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[-] jennwiththesea@lemmy.world 13 points 1 year ago

On Liftoff, I had to clear cache and storage in order to log back in. Still having issues with the website on Chrome, which keeps telling me I'm not logged in after clearing cache and logging back in.

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this post was submitted on 10 Jul 2023
2883 points (100.0% liked)

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