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Lemmy.world (and some others) were hacked (lemmy.world)

submitted 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) by ruud@lemmy.world to c/lemmyworld@lemmy.world

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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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[-] Ahmed@lemmy.world 138 points 1 year ago

Thanks Ruud for fixing it! Just a reminder guys that If you are using a third party app you need to login again.

[-] 200ok@lemmy.world 17 points 1 year ago

Thank you.

In case anyone else is having trouble logging in, my password wasn't working so I had to reset it from the website.

[-] 200ok@lemmy.world 12 points 1 year ago

So now I can log in via a 3rd party app but not the website (with the new password that I reset via the website.)

I'm currently posting from the 3rd party app. Digging around to try and find 2FA settings for Lemmy.

[-] 200ok@lemmy.world 18 points 1 year ago

Someone else commented that cookies need to be cleared on the website (again, for anyone else reading this and having issues.)

[-] ColleenLawson@lemmy.world 15 points 1 year ago

Further 3rd party heads up -- for us nontech refugees:

If it looks like you are logged in, you may not be. I use Connect, and at your reminder, I clicked my acct and it says I was logged in. I tried to comment that Connect login was working, and my comment didn't show up.

I tried again, only to see an ”error: not logged in” message pop up.

Signed out, signed in again manually, and all is well.

So do a double check, Lemurs. Trust in your actions, not your eyes.

[-] Bushwhack@lemmy.world 2 points 1 year ago

Can confirm. Was like: “Memmy is fine!” — **Narrator:**nope. It was not.

[-] Fotia_Kyrios@lemmy.world 1 points 1 year ago

Thanks for the info! Here is my test to see if I'm actually logged in.

[-] scarabic@lemmy.world 8 points 1 year ago

For capable people this is a minor annoyance but whenever there’s an “everyone needs to login again” issue, we will lose mere mortal users. In this case it wasn’t even clear that was needed - I appeared to be logged in but nothing worked. Ordinary users give up over things like this. I’ve seen it happen many times on sites where I had access to the analytics. I hope we regard this as a really bad thing to be avoided at all costs and not a “no big deal, just log in again.” Easy for you, easy for me, many others will just bail.