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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) 50 comments
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[-] JohnSaveourSocks@lemmy.world 6 points 1 year ago

Rock on, Rudd.

[-] 001100010010@lemmy.dbzer0.com 6 points 1 year ago

If I'm not from lemmy.world and visited a lemmy.world community via my home instance, does the hacker gain access to my account?

If I, while logged in to my home instance, accessed lemmy.world in another tab, does the hacker gain access to my account?

Does this hack infect devices used to access lemmy.world?

Sorry for noob questions, I'm just worried.

[-] ollie@lemmy.world 6 points 1 year ago

afaik, exploit does not pass through federation. but you should change your password just in case.

it doesn't and probably cannot infect your device

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[-] Reliant1087@lemmy.world 5 points 1 year ago

Thank you for taking the time to update this :) Hope everything will be sorted out without people being scared. As a layman, was any user data compromised?

[-] fikran@thebag.social 5 points 1 year ago

Ugh, people should not go after systems trying to give a free service to the internet. It just ruins everything.

[-] Drewfro66@lemmygrad.ml 3 points 1 year ago

On the other hand, the "attack" seemed to just be mostly harmless griefing and it's good for these sorts of vulnerabilities to be found early.

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

Yes, but responsible disclosure would've been even better.

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

As someone in EU I didn't even realized there was an issue. Well done and great reaction time! Also thank you for the transparency 👑

[-] ludw@lemmy.world 4 points 1 year ago

A lot of images seems to be gone from posts in /c/pics is this related to the hack or the cleanup after?

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

I heard there was some sort of database rollback to an uncompromised snapshot.

[-] TheFonz@lemmy.world 4 points 1 year ago

Seem to have a hard time loging in

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[-] Magiwarriorx@lemmy.world 4 points 1 year ago

Is it possible cookies for other websites were scraped? I was logged in to .world at the time; I have logged out of all accounts, and reset passwords as a precaution, but want to know if I should be on the lookout from this.

[-] sudneo@lemmy.world 4 points 1 year ago

No, in general it's not possible because the code in a page cannot access cookies that are bound to other domains. It is only possible if the "other" site misconfigured its own cookies (which is really not likely for stuff you would care about).

[-] dorumon@lemmy.world 4 points 1 year ago

Well that's just great it really is a shame though how some people would actively want to ruin something free like this just because they can.

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[-] alaxitoo@lemmy.world 4 points 1 year ago

I found this in my private messages, when an attack was happening I messaged the guy “are you ok” and he replied back to me with an image of my own message… I wonder if this was similar to what was done here? Was 8 days ago

[-] mayo@lemmy.world 6 points 1 year ago

Possible that they've had access for days, and different accounts were breached at different times.

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

No that was something else

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

Thanks for clarifying 🙏

[-] TheVampireSaga@lemmy.world 3 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

Here's a relevant post that talked about this with @AlmightySnoo@lemmy.world I think is worth looking into for anyone curious what exactly happened.

https://sh.itjust.works/post/923025

please don't visit the legal section of the website or anything confirmed compromised if anything.

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

Thanks all working again. Had to clear my browser cache in order to login again and had to resign in to memmy too.

I guess its early days for lemmy for incidents like this, fingers crossed something like this doesn't happen again :)

[-] sab@kbin.social 3 points 1 year ago

It's a nice reminder that those with the skills but not the bad intentions would be welcome to look through the source code for vulnerabilities and report/patch anything they might find. :)

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

Occasional cookie deletions I understand, but will sign-ins persist in the future?

[-] Sam1232188@lemmy.world 3 points 1 year ago

Thank the heavens the meme community stayed safe through this without my daily dose of cybersecurity memes idk how I would function ;)

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

Thanks for the quick reaction and TRANSPARENCY!!

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

I had an issue of being logged out of my account and could not log back in, after closing and reopening the site, closing browser, etc until I cleared my cookies, then it let me back in. If that helps anyone.

[-] Molecular0079@lemmy.world 2 points 1 year ago

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

[-] V4uban@lemmy.world 2 points 1 year ago

Thank you for your fast answer!

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this post was submitted on 10 Jul 2023
827 points (99.4% liked)

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