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@sh.itjust.works
    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
      5·
      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