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.

  • @Jakdracula
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    311 months ago

    I’d like to logout, then log back in, because I can’t upvote / downvote- how do I logout? I can’t seem to find a logout button.

    • @ChickenWings
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      211 months ago

      Are you on the web or an app?

      I’m using Liftoff app, and I had to clear my storage and cache to log out.

      • @Dr_Chocolate
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        111 months ago

        Where do yoh do that on Liftoff? I ended up reinstalling the app.

        • trouser_mouse
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          111 months ago

          Settings from top right

          Accounts

          Long press the account

          Click Remove

          Then add the account again