this post was submitted on 10 Jul 2023
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Lemmy.World Announcements

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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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[–] daniskarma@lemmy.world 3 points 2 years ago

Thanks for the quick response! This admin team rules!

[–] Jakdracula@lemmy.world 3 points 2 years ago (4 children)

I’d like to logout, then log back in, because I can’t upvote / downvote- how do I logout? I can’t seem to find a logout button.

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[–] Tom2day@lemmy.world 3 points 2 years ago (3 children)

Hmm. Liftoff won't let me post but shows logged in and as a newbie be damned if I can find where to log out.

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[–] JohnDolt@lemmy.world 3 points 2 years ago

Good shit! Thanks for keeping things up and the pretty quick response as well.

[–] TWeaK@lemm.ee 3 points 2 years ago (1 children)

Is a password change advised? How does the JWT cookie and exploit effect apps eg Jerboa?

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[–] Simodeus@lemmy.world 3 points 2 years ago* (last edited 2 years ago) (1 children)

It seems that I lost all my subs. There were not many but still annoying.

E: Still subbed but can't see those in Voyager.

[–] vampyre@lemmy.world 2 points 2 years ago* (last edited 2 years ago)

I thought I’d lost mine too, and when I checked the community I wasn’t subbed. I could still view my profile, comments and posts though.

I cleared the cache, then tried to post here and it said I was logged out (even though I could see all my activity except subs). I couldn’t see any way to logout, so I edited my profile and re-entered my password then hit save. That seems to have fixed it, now I can post and my subs are back.

[–] V4uban@lemmy.world 3 points 2 years ago

Thank you for your fast answer!

[–] Molecular0079@lemmy.world 3 points 2 years ago

Thanks for the post-mortem and the quick fix! Glad you guys around to help battle test Lemmy's code.

[–] NausetJF@lemmy.world 3 points 2 years ago (2 children)

I appreciate the transparency. Hopefully with more eyes on the source code hacks like this will not happen again.

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[–] Noedel@lemmy.world 2 points 2 years ago (1 children)

Is this why I had to sign in and out of my account on liftoff?

I couldn't comment untill I did that. There may be others!

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[–] sheetmysharts@lemmy.world 2 points 2 years ago

Thanks to everyone involved for the quick response πŸ‘

[–] weeahnn@lemmy.blahaj.zone 2 points 2 years ago (1 children)

is that why I can't log into my lemmy.world account?

[–] weeahnn@lemmy.world 2 points 2 years ago

ok not a problem anymore. seems like I just had to clear my cache and it let me log in

[–] chokidar@lemmy.world 2 points 2 years ago

Well done on acting on it so quickly. I think I did see some of the fake announcements you were referring too but were taken down very quickly. Keep up the good work team and thanks for everything you are doing!

[–] Staff@lemmy.world 2 points 2 years ago
[–] downpunxx@lemmy.world 2 points 2 years ago

******* This happened to me, one of my posts had it's photo deleted (I didn't delete it), then when I replaced it, the next time I checked the entire post had been deleted.

[–] hacktheegg@programming.dev 2 points 2 years ago

Huh, i think i got lucky by forgetting that there is something i can consume other than youtube

[–] Rooki@lemmy.world 2 points 2 years ago* (last edited 2 years ago) (1 children)

Is there a rough time range when it happened? and any news about other big instances like lemmy.ml? Are those safe? Currently they are not on the same version as lemmy.world.

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[–] mourkeer@lemmy.world 2 points 2 years ago (1 children)

I lost some of my post history. Is there a data issue that's come from this? Why are my comments gone?

[–] pgetsos@kbin.social 2 points 2 years ago (1 children)

If it is only recent post history, maybe it was purged along with many malicious comments/posts

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[–] gabriele97@lemmy.g97.top 2 points 2 years ago (1 children)

How are you preventing it to happen again until a patch is released from devs?

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[–] possiblylinux127@lemmy.zip 2 points 2 years ago (1 children)

This seems way worse than they are making it sound.

[–] vd1n@lemmy.ml 2 points 2 years ago* (last edited 2 years ago)

Sucks for them I've been sending a virus to my own account pretending I'm not me...

well I guess it's our account now...

...does this mean I'm gay?

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