Lemmy.world and other instances hacked - LemmyWorld
lemmy.world
A number of Lemmy instances have been hacked overnight. Some may remain inaccessible until they have been secured and restarted. As a safety precaution logged-on sessions on many servers have been cancelled and you are required to logon again. Unfortunately, the only way I could find to do this in Liftoff! is by going to Settings > Accounts and deleting each local account by long pressing on it, and then create it again. All your posts, comments and bookmarks should be preserved during this process. Please see the linked posts for further details as they emerge. Thanks all, and please bear with us as this gets resolved.

Drawing attention on this instance so Admins are aware and can address the propagating exploit.

EDIT: Found more info about the patch.

A more thorough recap of the issue.

GitHub PR fixing the bug: https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy-ui/pull/1897/files

If your instance has custom emojis defined, this is exploitable everywhere Markdown is available. It is NOT restricted to admins, but can be used to steal an admin’s JWT, which then lets the attacker get into that admin’s account which can then spread the exploit further by putting it somewhere where it’s rendered on every single page and then deface the site.

If your instance doesn’t have any custom emojis, you are safe, the exploit requires custom emojis to trigger the bad code branch.

  • @[email protected]English
    7•1 year ago

    Lmao you very clearly have absolutely no idea what you’re talking about.

    I dislike tankies myself, but this was absolutely not a backdoor.

    • bioemerl
      -11•1 year ago

      I literally said this wasn’t in my comment. This is evidence of how easy it is to sneak in a back door.

      • @[email protected]English
        7•1 year ago

        This comment further underlines to me that you have absolutely no idea what the fuck you’re talking about.

        You’re out of your element, Donny.

        • bioemerl
          -6•1 year ago

          And you’re aggressively confidently wrong. Evidence by the fact that you give literally zero reasoning.

          The fact a bug like this can happen is clear and obvious evidence for how these things can happen, and this was just stupidity, not targeted malice.

          • @[email protected]English
            6•1 year ago

            Lmao go touch grass my guy.

            It’s not a backdoor. It wasn’t malicious. Yes, some major contributors are tankies, but that doesn’t really matter. That’s the beauty of OSS: everyone can see the code, which means everyone can spot sketchy shit - either malicious or completely accidental - and fix it. The fact that a patch was published in a matter of literally hours is confirmation of this.

            If this was a malicious exploit, it’d have been obscured far more, it would likely encompass more than a handful of insecure data-handling statements, and we’d have seen a LOT more instances getting popped.

            • bioemerl
              -3•1 year ago

              It’s not a backdoor. It wasn’t malicious

              Read my comment again. I literally said this wasn’t. I said this is experience that it could be easily done in the future.

              everyone can see the code, which means everyone can spot sketchy shit - either malicious or completely accidental - and fix it.

              Didn’t help in this case. Open Source doesn’t fix malicious contributions, and when the project owners are the malicious source your have no safeguards. Trust is still essential.

              If this was a malicious exploit, it’d have been obscured far more,

              Ex-fucking-xactly

              • @[email protected]English
                2•1 year ago

                I’m not going to litigate the entire topic of trust within the context of software and systems engineering with you.

                This is the sort of Reddit interaction that I don’t miss.

                • bioemerl
                  -2•1 year ago

                  “I’m going going to explain why you’re clearly wrong and I’m clearly right because that would open me up to making arguments that can actually be argued against”.

                  You treat open source like it’s a magic sprinkle to get trustworthy code. It isn’t, and when malicious actors control the code base and write the majority of the code it is hilariously easy to sneak many bugs in over the years. Even projects like Linux, run by people you can actually trust, have issues with third party contributors despite incredibly rigerous approval process.

                  I’m damn well aware of how this works, and you believe open source gives you security that simply does not exist.

                  • @[email protected]English
                    2•1 year ago

                    OSS is not magic. Never claimed it was.

                    At this point, I am no longer sure what you’re trying to argue about.

                    But regardless of the knowledge you may or may not have, your comment pattern seems to be that of a troll, so you get the honor of being the first user I’m gonna block on lemmy! <3