this post was submitted on 10 Jul 2023

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Lemmy.world (and some others) were hacked (lemmy.world)

submitted 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

724 comments fedilink hide all child comments

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 8) 50 comments

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[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago

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

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago (2 children)

May I ask was is the JWS coockinand if it is automatically changed or if we have to change it in a way?

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[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago (1 children)

My main is locked up and it sucks, i hope this all gets fixed.

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[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago

Thanks for the quick response! This admin team rules!

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago (1 children)

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

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago

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

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year 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.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year 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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[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year 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!

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago

Thanks to everyone involved for the quick response 👍

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year 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.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago

2:11 UTC is my first record of the event taking place, but keep in mind the attacker could have injected code long before without noticeable impacts. There's no way to be completely certain they didn't steal tokens and access accounts before they made themselves known.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year 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?

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago (1 children)

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

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago

I know but this was over a week of comments lost.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago (1 children)

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

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[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago

thanks to admin team for resolving that quickly

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago

Thanks for fixing it.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago

Maybe there needs to be a quick rundown how to actually log out and in on clients, seems you can't with jerboa without just wiping the app, and wefwef, you need to delete all accounts.

I see some instances are throwing server errors

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago

Thanks.

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