Very impressed by how quickly action has been taken by this and other instances to patch the issue.

I wish hackers would invest their time in clearing credit card debt, deleting hospital fees, or something else that actually serves the public good, instead of hacking ordinary people just trying to get by.

what steps are being taken to ensure it doesn't happen again? was any personal data compromised for users?

First - really good summary and sounds like everyone is working hard.

Cross posting the below comment.

Under GDPR if you have had a data breach you have a legal obligation to assess whether you need to report it and you must make the report within 72 hours of discovering the breach.

There are other types of reportable breaches too, I only mention data as it sounds most likely. You may or may not be subject to PECR which may also have been breached although less likely. I don’t really have enough familiarity with the regulation to discuss that one.

If you are not sure if there has been a breach you may also need to discuss it with the relevant body or make a report.

Please can you update what action you have taken regarding this and if the incident was reportable or not and the reasons why. Edit - from that new information, it sounds like this is a reportable breach.

For a full understanding, it would be good to know if you had 2FA enabled on the compromised account particularly as it had admin privileges and if so how 2FA was circumvented with this exploit.

It would also be good to know what measures you have in place to prevent the same or other malicious attempts on your Open Collective and Patreon accounts as issues with those are potentially more serious. They may not be vulnerable to this, but it is going to be reassuring to know there is good security practice, 2FA protection etc enabled and you have robust procedures in place.

Thank you for your work 🙏

Thanks for the work. As a heads up it appears most of the block instances are back however I believe explodingheads is still missing which you may want to confirm.

EDIT: it has been added back to the block list.

the details of the vulnerability are already known now anyway since there's a fix that was proposed on the Lemmy GitHub so I don't think it will hurt others to talk about it

Can we get another admin to sign off on this being authentic? In other words, short of a signed GPG signature how do we trust announcements after a breach where admin accounts are compromised?

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

IMPORTANT ANNOUNCEMENT: My account was not among those hacked. Any random bullshit appearing in my post/comment history was written by me.

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!

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

Thanks for your efforts. I know that Lemmy was put in place rather quickly as a Reddit alternative. But I'm genuinely hopeful that this will be a good alternative.

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

One thing I don't get. Custom emojis can only be created by an admin, but you're saying an admin's account here got compromised because of that and not the other way around. Does that mean that an evil instance set a custom emoji with the injected JavaScript and propagated it to the federated instances?

Does an admin account have any permissions to view email addresses or data of registered users?

Did MichelleG not have 2FA enabled?

Now that this has happened, it's be worth pushing this issue through as high priority. If HttpOnly was enabled, then an admin takeover would not have been possible.

https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy-ui/issues/1252

Amazing how you quickly reacted to this!! Bravo!!

TIP: if you can't login after what happened, clear out your browser cache including ALL cookies, that fixes it (it did for me at least). I believe it's also advisable to change lemmy password.

I can't log into my account anymore, this one is a new one I've just made. I tried to reset my password but nothing came in the mailbox. I can still see comments and posts from that account though.

It's this one:

And I don't know why but I can't save the profile pic for this account.

Edit: Nvm, I use another email to sign up for Lemmy and forgot about it