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.

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments

[–] asunaspersonalasst@lemmy.world 24 points 1 year ago (4 children)

So, do we change passwords, esp those who logged on during the attack? (I created this acct right before the attack happened tho.)

[–] ruud@lemmy.world 40 points 1 year ago

No, passwords weren't compromised

[–] sgtlighttree@kbin.social 36 points 1 year ago

I think it's good practice to change passwords after an attack no matter what

[–] woelkchen@lemmy.world 2 points 1 year ago

So, do we change passwords

If you don't use a randomly generated password, it's a good idea to change it anyway. Not because of this specific attack but in general. For the longest time the Lemmy software was just a hobby of a very small group of individuals. While the back-end is written in Rust and probably more robust than the PHP code over at Kbin, I don't think a proper security review was ever conducted, so there's a not so small chance there will be some additional growing pains in the somewhat near future.

[–] lagomorphlecture@lemm.ee 1 points 1 year ago

According to the admin, no, but changing your password and keeping your data safer is always totally fine to do and you should probably do it every once in a while regardless.