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]
    16•1 year ago

    On Liftoff, I had to clear cache and storage in order to log back in. Still having issues with the website on Chrome, which keeps telling me I’m not logged in after clearing cache and logging back in.

    • @[email protected]
      3•1 year ago

      Just wanted to say thanks for telling me this! Solved my issue and I wouldn’t have thought of it straight away at all.

    • river
      2•1 year ago

      Thanks for your comment. You helped solve this issue for me (iOS just have to delete app and reinstall it).

      • @[email protected]
        1•1 year ago

        I’ll have to try a second time, then. I got Liftoff to work again, which is my primary access point.

    • @[email protected]
      1•1 year ago

      Liftoff hasn’t acknowledged me as logged in when voting or commenting for the last day, despite showing it on my user tab. I’m assuming that’s related to the recent hack, but I’ve tried clearing the cash, logging in and out, and restarting the app with no success.