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

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

Thanks to everyone involved for the quick response 👍

[–] 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!

[–] 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.

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[–] sma3in@lemmy.world 2 points 2 years ago

that is why I got logged off from my account this morning!! impressed by the rapid intervention!! Good job lemmy team!

[–] 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.

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

thanks to admin team for resolving that quickly

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

Thanks for fixing it.

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

Thanks.

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

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

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

Thanks for the update, I appreciate the transparency.

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

Does this have anything to do with the Wefwef app name change?

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

Because I am obsessed with bugles, any comment or post I make that does not manage to fit bugles in somewhere (because I always have room for bugles) will be an imposter!

Thank you for the transparency and keeping my nefarious bugle consumption private!

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