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.
If I had to propose something, I’d suggest writing a spec and implementing an API for Lemmy servers that would allow one to submit signed actions, like posts, comments, likes, display name, etc. Then people will write clients that will allow generation of certificates to be used to sign those messages + add the ability to export/back up the key to be used by other apps too.
If storage space ever becomes an issue, you could potentially shard communities. I’m more worried about the network traffic. I already suggested a routing algorithm that would spread the load between all federated instances and would scale like
O(log(N)). There was some interest, but it would be a long term project. There’s still a lot of performance that can be gained by simple optimisations.Yeah, there are more pressing issues at hand, a lot of bugs, a lot of new features that need to be implemented ASAP. Like user following, Lemmy is still lacking that.