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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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[-] grissee@lemm.ee 1 points 1 year ago

uh, why did you have negative one dislike?

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

Negative one upvotes would mean that enough people disliked me/another poster to bring my upvote total to zero. (Upvotes and likes are effectively the same thing, it’s just a naming convention). Reddit totals them up and seemingly Lemmy does as well.

[-] grissee@lemm.ee 1 points 1 year ago

huh that's weird (yes I meant negative one downvote), I already know that the total can be either positive or negative, but shouldn't the upvote number and downvote number be either positive or zero? (for now I'll just accept it as a lemmy bug/ inconsistencies between instances)

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

Nope, just like Reddit it’s a value that ranges between negatives and positives. If I get two thousand upvotes, positive 2k. If I get two thousand downvotes, negative 1999 (because iirc you start with one by default).

Not exactly sure I understood what you meant by “either positive or zero”.

[-] grissee@lemm.ee 2 points 1 year ago

see your comment rn, it has 1 upvote (from yourself by default) and 0 dislike (so it's not shown)

but in the screenshot I sent above you got 287 upvote and minus -1 downvote (making your total 288) which is mathematically correct but seems like an unintended behavior

for example this comment of mine normally have 9 upvote and 2 downvote (which is shown as a positive integer 2, not negative), making my total upvote 7