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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[–] 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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[–] 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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[–] Jakdracula@lemmy.world 3 points 2 years ago (1 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.

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

Are you on the web or an app?

I'm using Liftoff app, and I had to clear my storage and cache to log out.

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[–] 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.

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

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

[–] Nomadic@lemmy.world 2 points 2 years 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

[–] 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

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

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

[–] 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

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

thanks to admin team for resolving that quickly

[–] Tom2day@lemmy.world 2 points 2 years ago
[–] 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!

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

Great job everyone! Keep it up! Love the transparency!

[–] 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.

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

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

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

Is this why I can't log in on Chrome? I switched to Firefox and it worked.

[–] Thomas_Ladder69@lemmy.world 2 points 2 years ago (2 children)

No. This was during a pretty specific time yesterday night.

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

Thanks to everyone involved for the quick response πŸ‘

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