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.

  • @[email protected]
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    71 year ago

    I’m on iOS with the Memmy app. It’s a work in progress that’s officially unfinished so I’m not surprised but it has also been a bit buggy. Doesn’t seem that I can log out without deleting and reinstalling the app so hopefully this doesn’t happen too often XD

    • @[email protected]
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      61 year ago

      So I was actually just struggling with that myself, also in the Memmy app in case that isn’t clear

      What I did was add my account (again)

      There was no warning or anything, and it populated the list with two of me.

      At that point, a “delete account” option appeared under both of them. So I guess in normal circumstances, it wants you to keep one account around at all times?

      I deleted one of them, and the app basically reinitialized. Both were gone and it showed me the welcome screen.

      I logged back in, and now everything is back to normal

      • NaN
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        11 year ago

        I just did edit account and then saved, it seemed to trick it into logging in again (secrets on my instance were also reset).

      • JJROKCZ
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        11 year ago

        Finally I found good instructions, was about to delete and reinstall until I followed this!

      • @[email protected]
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        11 year ago

        Interesting. Definitely could be made clearer, I’ll make a post on the GitHub later about some of my suggestions.

    • @[email protected]
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      31 year ago

      I found I didn’t actually have to log out, just go into account settings and reconfirm everything without changing it

    • @[email protected]
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      11 year ago

      I was I able to upvote anything or subscribe. Seems like uninstalling and reinstalling fixed my issue