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

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Lemmy.world (and some others) were hacked (lemmy.world)
submitted 2 years ago* (last edited 2 years ago) by ruud@lemmy.world to c/lemmyworld@lemmy.world
273 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.

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

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

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

Thank you for your fast answer!

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

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

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

Thanks for the quick reaction and TRANSPARENCY!!

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

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

[–] henfredemars 2 points 2 years ago

You will have to login again for those apps. As far as we know, the exploit doesn't allow someone to actually steal your password directly, just the session you were logged into.

However, it is my personal opinion that you should change your password anyway out of an abundance of caution.

[–] Simodeus@lemmy.world 2 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.

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[–] 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.

[–] henfredemars 1 points 2 years 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.

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

Interesting.

Attackers started changing site settings and posting fake announcements etc

So at least that wasn't 100% malicious, otherwise they could've kept the vuln hidden and just collect data and whatnot.

On the other hand, who cared enough about Lemmy to hack it? Weird.

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

lemmy explorer still acting kinda funny, not sure who is the person in charge to inform

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[–] mayo@lemmy.world 1 points 2 years ago

Had an issue at work not long ago involving stolen tokens and back then it looked as if the token was scraped along with a lot of other web traffic and then about 12 days later they gained access.

[–] daniskarma@lemmy.world 1 points 2 years ago

Thanks for the quick response! This admin team rules!

[–] earthseedle@lemmy.world 1 points 2 years ago

Thanks for fixing it.

[–] tobier@lemmy.world 1 points 2 years ago

Thanks for being open about this and quick to fix it!

[–] hacktheegg@programming.dev 1 points 2 years ago

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

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

Damn, I go to bed early and I miss everything! Thanks for the quick resolution and transparent disclosure, this place is great!

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

I’ve been unable to login on desktop since this happened. Only been able to login via Memmy on IOS.

I put in my info and it kicks me back to the front page and doesn’t log me in.

I’ve tried clearing cache too

EDIT: Switching browser to Edge seemed to let me. Weird. Even reinstalled Firefox and still won't let me.

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