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.

  • @Pillarist
    link
    51 year ago

    I had an issue of being logged out of my account and could not log back in, after closing and reopening the site, closing browser, etc until I cleared my cookies, then it let me back in. If that helps anyone.

    • @[email protected]
      link
      fedilink
      21 year ago

      Likewise. I tried to log in but nothing would happen. I had to clear out my browser cookies first.

      • @Pillarist
        link
        21 year ago

        I’m just glad the account isn’t gone completely.