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.

  • @stink_pickle
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    1 year ago

    Um, probably coincidence or a false posi, but malwarebytes is labeling lemmy.worldtoday as being compromised / malicious when following external links, it’s only popped up twice, but here’s a slightly redacted log file:

    -Log Details- Protection Event Date: 7/10/23 Protection Event Time: 1:24 PM

    -Software Information- Version: 4.5.33.272 Components Version: 1.0.2069 Update Package Version: 1.0.72209 License: Premium

    -System Information- OS: Windows 11 (Build 22621.1928) CPU: x64 File System: NTFS User: System

    -Blocked Website Details- Malicious Website: 1 , C:\Program Files\Google\Chrome Beta\Application\chrome.exe, Blocked, -1, -1, 0.0.0, ,

    -Website Data- Category: Compromised Domain: lemmy.today

    (end)