this post was submitted on 10 Jul 2023
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submitted 2 years ago* (last edited 2 years ago) by ruud to c/lemmyworld
 

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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[–] adamlc 6 points 2 years ago (1 children)

Thanks all working again. Had to clear my browser cache in order to login again and had to resign in to memmy too.

I guess its early days for lemmy for incidents like this, fingers crossed something like this doesn't happen again :)

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[–] Reliant1087 6 points 2 years ago

Thank you for taking the time to update this :) Hope everything will be sorted out without people being scared. As a layman, was any user data compromised?

[–] debeluhar 6 points 2 years ago (1 children)

I wasn't using webpage, I was only using mobile app (Connect). Could my coockie be also stolen that way or was that only possible on webpage?

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[–] TheVampireSaga 6 points 2 years ago* (last edited 2 years ago)

Here's a relevant post that talked about this with @[email protected] I think is worth looking into for anyone curious what exactly happened.

https://sh.itjust.works/post/923025

please don't visit the legal section of the website or anything confirmed compromised if anything.

[–] SnowGlobal 6 points 2 years ago

Excellent, thanks for the quick response ruud and admins.

[–] PolarBone 5 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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[–] ludw 5 points 2 years ago (1 children)

A lot of images seems to be gone from posts in /c/pics is this related to the hack or the cleanup after?

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[–] wildcelt 5 points 2 years ago (3 children)

Poor beehaw.org is still down

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[–] alaxitoo 5 points 2 years ago (4 children)

I found this in my private messages, when an attack was happening I messaged the guy “are you ok” and he replied back to me with an image of my own message… I wonder if this was similar to what was done here? Was 8 days ago

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[–] tamal3 5 points 2 years ago* (last edited 2 years ago)

Thanks for the info, Ruud. I just put in for a monthly donation to you all -- I appreciate you.

[–] Magiwarriorx 5 points 2 years ago (1 children)

Is it possible cookies for other websites were scraped? I was logged in to .world at the time; I have logged out of all accounts, and reset passwords as a precaution, but want to know if I should be on the lookout from this.

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[–] CascadianBeam 5 points 2 years ago (1 children)

Testing… I have to keep trying this because memmy is being a dick.

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[–] Monochromepsychward 5 points 2 years ago (2 children)

What are the risks for people who use Jerboa for Lemmy? I logged put and back in and there doesn't seem to be any issues, so are the app users excluded from this?

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[–] itsdavetho 5 points 2 years ago (6 children)

Would it be a good idea to force a login if the users IP or device suddenly changes?

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[–] xandowsk 5 points 2 years ago

Congratulations everyone on the quick fix/mitigation!

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