Lemmy.world (and some others) were hacked

Ruud@lemmy.worldmod to Lemmy.World Announcements@lemmy.world – 2321 points –

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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Should I change passwords or no?

No, unless you see posts that you didn't create in your history, you should be fine.

Afaik, there's no way to get your password from the JWT and access to account, right?

Correct, the password is not viewable. But using this exploit a hacker would have access to the settings page of your account and modify password/email address etc.

I think you need the old password to make a new one!

You could change the email and then request a password reset. But yes you're right, that wouldn't work from the settings page! :)

If you have to ask, just change it. It's free and quick, and it's good practice.

Err... no.

Does he have a specific reason to believe his account was compromised?

You seem like the kind of guy that will always tell someone to change their password no matter what. Kind of useless information at that point.