this post was submitted on 10 Jul 2023
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Yea, I switched to this alt. It appears to be one of the assistant admins accts. Seems like an old fashioned anon prank, to me, they're mainly just trying to make stuff offensive and redirect people to lemonparty.
So, y'know, old school.
I don't know if any data is actually in danger, but I doubt it. I don't see why assistant admins would need access to it.
All the bean memes are in danger! On a serious note, old-skool or not, it's a huge loss of trust in something the community-at-large is excited to see replace reddit.
Par for the course. This system will never be immune to things like that. That's part of what happens when you decentralize your power. Instead of a single target that can be made highly secure, you have a distributed array of targets.
People should certainly be engaging on here with full awareness of the reality of the Fediverse, not expecting reddit 2.0. We never will be able to offer exactly what they did. We'll be naturally worse in some areas and naturally better in others.
This is why I'm glad I made redundant accounts on multiple instances. When there are problems on lemmy.world, I can just hop on over to another. That's never been an option with Reddit.
Now if there was only a way to export or sync user settings like subscriptions, it would be perfect.
There's actually another thread on exactly this topic: https://lemmy.ml/post/1875767
Is there a way to link posts in the context of the reader’s instance? Like with !c community links?
I don't think so, but I'd love to be proven wrong!
It’s not great but if you copy the URL into your instance’s search, you can get to the post that way.
Yeah that’s what I’ve been doing. There was this great bot that was autocorrecting community links and I was hoping this was possible for post-links on Lemmy instances.
That's fair. I shouldn't have said "replace reddit."
On the other hand, look at where we are. This is proof that one hack can't take down Lemmy.
True that. If you look at posts on lemmy.world though, it's clear their users (which is like 50% of Lemmy) have zero clue they're defederated ATM, and probably many that don't know it's compromised.
Federation and decentralization are not Web 2.0 concepts. Just like people who first learned what a tweet and a follow were and all the other concepts of those social media platforms, they'll learn the new paradigm. Or they won't and we'll stick to 2.0 platforms.
If there is a vulnerability in the software, it’s entirely possible for a single attack to take everyone down. All the instances are known and easily discovered.
idk, im surprised it took this long. there's a huge variety of admin teams with varying degrees of security awareness and it's been over a month since the first big influx of users started. it'll happen again too and probably not before too long
In the 3 years Hexbear has been around it has been attacked A LOT because obviously far right chuds have an interest in messing with leftists but has not to my knowledge had an admin breach. At one point image embeds were completely disabled because they were handing over data they shouldn't though and risked exposing people to doxxing.
i did switch from reddit to lemmy.world because i expected it to be a safe alternative that would atleast pay a lot of attention to security. so yes, the trust in security is broken a lot with this. especially since it happend so soon after so many people joined. i already think about maybe making my own instance to keep my account safe in the future.
My concern is that configuring the site to automatically redirect users sounds like they have pretty large control over the site - the kind of control that I would assume is usually limited to users with root access on the server.
Obviously hope nothing of value is lost and that there is a proper off-site backup of the content.
Edit: See Max-P's comment, it looks like the site redirection was accomplished in a way that IMO suggests they do NOT have full control over the site. We'll obviously have to wait for the full debrief from the admins.
Yeah the "redirect somewhere else" attack definitely doesn't necessarily require any particular control of the site. Usually it's noticing that you can trick some text into being run as Javascript, instead of interpreted as text... And then you just stick in a cheeky little
<notarealscript>window.location = "https://www.badsite.horse"</notarealscript>into that spot.Then every time that comment, username, (in this case apparently) custom emoji, etc. gets loaded, whoops, the code runs and off you go!
So no control of the site is required at all.
because it's easier than figuring out what permissions they actually need
Lemmy permission system is very limited, it's a boolean for admin
this is what happens when socialists design hierarchies