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.

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[–] trouser_mouse@lemmy.world 90 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (17 children)

First - really good summary and sounds like everyone is working hard.

Cross posting the below comment.

Under GDPR if you have had a data breach you have a legal obligation to assess whether you need to report it and you must make the report within 72 hours of discovering the breach.

There are other types of reportable breaches too, I only mention data as it sounds most likely. You may or may not be subject to PECR which may also have been breached although less likely. I don’t really have enough familiarity with the regulation to discuss that one.

If you are not sure if there has been a breach you may also need to discuss it with the relevant body or make a report.

Please can you update what action you have taken regarding this and if the incident was reportable or not and the reasons why. Edit - from that new information, it sounds like this is a reportable breach.

For a full understanding, it would be good to know if you had 2FA enabled on the compromised account particularly as it had admin privileges and if so how 2FA was circumvented with this exploit.

It would also be good to know what measures you have in place to prevent the same or other malicious attempts on your Open Collective and Patreon accounts as issues with those are potentially more serious. They may not be vulnerable to this, but it is going to be reassuring to know there is good security practice, 2FA protection etc enabled and you have robust procedures in place.

[–] veganpizza69@lemmy.world 4 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (4 children)

Can 2FA be enabled for all users? I don't see the link to activate it after saving.

edit

Yeah, this doesn’t work at all. The apps don’t open links anymore. I tried some github site that reads the link and generates a QR, but the codes don’t work. This is a complete waste of time.

[–] nelrico@lemmy.world 6 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

Just reload the settings page after saving and you'll see the activation link. Just now enabled 2FA for my account.

[–] user224@lemmy.sdf.org 5 points 1 year ago (2 children)

Don't log out! Open private tab and try logging in to test that it works. Lemmy uses SHA-256 TOTP digest which may not work correctly with some authenticators, only generating useless codes.

[–] muddybulldog@mylemmy.win 2 points 1 year ago

The interface for TOTP need to be greatly improved as well. I made sure that I had two browsers logged in when I did it because the flow is so hinky. Not having a confirmation process was a bit nerve racking.

[–] veganpizza69@lemmy.world 1 points 1 year ago

Yeah, this doesn't work at all. The apps don't open links anymore. I tried some github site that reads the link and generates a QR, but the codes don't work. This is a complete waste of time.

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