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.

  • Obinice
    link
    21 year ago

    Is this why Jerboa seems to not work any more? It keeps insisting I’m not logged in, when I am, showing me as anonymous, but also showing my profile details, not letting me interact with things, etc… It’s been a big problem these past few days making Lemmy unusable :-(

    • @SpaceMan9000
      link
      41 year ago

      Had the same with liftoff. Probably the app thinking the JWT is valid but the server declining it out of precaution.

      I just logged out and back in again.

    • @Turizmo
      link
      21 year ago

      I had a similar issue. I solved it by clearing the storage/cache for the Jerboa app, then signing back in.