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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[–] WhoRoger@lemmy.world 9 points 1 year ago (4 children)

Interesting.

Attackers started changing site settings and posting fake announcements etc

So at least that wasn't 100% malicious, otherwise they could've kept the vuln hidden and just collect data and whatnot.

On the other hand, who cared enough about Lemmy to hack it? Weird.

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[–] 001100010010@lemmy.dbzer0.com 8 points 1 year ago (2 children)

If I'm not from lemmy.world and visited a lemmy.world community via my home instance, does the hacker gain access to my account?

If I, while logged in to my home instance, accessed lemmy.world in another tab, does the hacker gain access to my account?

Does this hack infect devices used to access lemmy.world?

Sorry for noob questions, I'm just worried.

[–] ollie@lemmy.world 9 points 1 year ago

afaik, exploit does not pass through federation. but you should change your password just in case.

it doesn't and probably cannot infect your device

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[–] JohnSaveourSocks@lemmy.world 8 points 1 year ago

Rock on, Rudd.

[–] godless@lemmy.world 8 points 1 year ago (2 children)

With the JWT secret rotation, shouldn't everyone be forced to re-login? I'm posting with my existing session without any changes.

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[–] iMike@lemmy.world 8 points 1 year ago

Must have been jealous spez

[–] dorumon@lemmy.world 8 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Well that's just great it really is a shame though how some people would actively want to ruin something free like this just because they can.

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[–] Autumbloom@lemmy.world 8 points 1 year ago (2 children)

Thanks for the transparency. Was having issues with Lemmy, now seems everything back to normal. Got a question, Just to add an extra layer of security, Do i need to use ToR or VPN with Lemmy ?

[–] PussyXdestroyer69@lemmy.world 6 points 1 year ago

That wouldn't have helped. Don't consider this a secure messaging platform, or use this to communicate banking details or something.

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[–] Reliant1087@lemmy.world 6 points 1 year ago

Thank you for taking the time to update this :) Hope everything will be sorted out without people being scared. As a layman, was any user data compromised?

[–] debeluhar@lemmy.world 6 points 1 year ago (1 children)

I wasn't using webpage, I was only using mobile app (Connect). Could my coockie be also stolen that way or was that only possible on webpage?

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