WARNING: Lemmy Self-Hosters, There Have Been CSAM Attacks taking place against !lemmyshitpost@lemmy.worldlocked

Jamie@jamie.moe to Selfhosted@lemmy.world – 500 points –

cross-posted from: https://jamie.moe/post/113630

There have been users spamming CSAM content in !lemmyshitpost@lemmy.world causing it to federate to other instances. If your instance is subscribed to this community, you should take action to rectify it immediately. I recommend performing a hard delete via command line on the server.

I deleted every image from the past 24 hours personally, using the following command: sudo find /srv/lemmy/example.com/volumes/pictrs/files -type f -ctime -1 -exec shred {} \;

Note: Your local jurisdiction may impose a duty to report or other obligations. Check with these, but always prioritize ensuring that the content does not continue to be served.

Update

Apparently the Lemmy Shitpost community is shut down as of now.

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My tin foil hat is telling me it’s one of the other social media companies funding a hacking group to do it. They stand to have the most to lose, and they’ve seemingly decided to enjoy changing the narrative regarding multiple topics. Lemmy stands directly against what the bigger social medias stand for.

I have no evidence to back this though. As a business owner I just know that things become very consistent when people are being paid, and very inconsistent when they aren’t. These attacks are seemingly very consistent/organized.

You think a company that is posed to go public is going to attack a competitor with a minuscule amount of traffic with extremely illegal material that could put them in prison for even having?

See, I don’t believe this was done by a large corp. But all the DDoSing that’s happened? I can see u/spez orchestrating that.

Lemmy isn’t a threat to Reddit. It’s the same old trolls doing it like every other time.

I don’t think they do see it as a threat, I just think spez is petty enough and juvenile enough to do it.

Like, again, I pretty solely think it’s spez’s own personal ego shit. For example, he could have just shutdown the API. Instead, he had a weeks-long meltdown including committing libel against a developer. Someone like Zuckerberg doing this doesn’t make any sense to me, but I can totally see spez being exactly that kind of petty.

He’s have to acknowledge Lemmy being a threat, which it’s not, and which his ego won’t allow anyway. The simplest answer is the best.

Reddit? No. I was thinking moreso Meta. They have the deeper pockets and a proven track record of breaking privacy laws to their own benefit.

That’s even worse. Meta probably doesn’t even know what Lemmy is.

So then why was Meta trying to get Threads to be on the Fediverse? Of course they're aware of any potential threats, no matter how small.

Why reinvent the wheel if someone’s just going to hand you the backend? Lemmy is no threat to them.

The threat is a new sustainable community that's sheltered from advertising that people could leave Factbook/Instagram/whatever and go to.

Meta was talking about adding Mastodon federation to their Threads app. So I very much doubt it.

They'd probably take an Embrace, Expand, Extinguish approach.

You would pay a third party to do it. And keep details extremely vague so you have plausible deniability.

You have a massively inflated view of Lemmy's importance in the social media market.

There must be room under that tinfoil hat for the both of us, because this was my first thought too.

The longer it continues, the more likely that scenario is IMO. Bitter alt-right extremists would probably start losing interest after a short while, whereas social media competitors would stand to gain from long-term interference.

I'd go with state actors first.

When a particular social media platform is centralized, you can buy yourself a say percentage of stock and have sway over it (cough tencent), or have a useful idiot ruin the platform (cough musk), or another useful idiot to run propaganda you like anyway (cough truth social, cough fox news, cough newsmax...), or yet another that will sell out it's host country's citizens for cold hard cash (cough facebook).

But when that social media platform is decentralized? Well, then you'd need to figure out how to poison the well early on to stave off adoption. The Saudi Arabias, UAEs, Chinas definitely don't like the idea of lemmy, and it'll be way harder for them to control if critical mass is hit.

Yep, that’s a great point.

Add to that the fact that mainstream social media companies wouldn’t touch DDoS and CSAM attacks with a 100-foot pole, even if they contracted with a third party. Both of these attacks are highly illegal and would surely ruin a publicly traded company (or one that’s trying to go public, like Reddit).

And don’t forget Russia in your list of state actors who are threatened by the unrestricted flow of information. They definitely don’t want their citizenry to be informed of how disastrously their invasion of Ukraine is going, or what a murderous scumbag Putin is.

You don't get a lot of upvotes and sure we don't know but it isn't like the NSA infiltrated (in person) left wing groups and more.

It's definitely a possibility that someone doesn't like decentralised content enough to put some meager efforts against it.