Lemmy.world (and some others) were hacked

Ruud@lemmy.worldmod to Lemmy.World Announcements@lemmy.world – 2319 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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If you had 2FA enabled and aren't logged into a browser anymore I think your pretty much just fucked. I've tried to get 2FA working with bitwarden and found out that even if you don't set up 2FA it's still enabled on the account once you check the box.

They just need someone to reset their account.

If that's true then the 2FA is worthless. even when you do set it up there isn't a verification process like most other sites so if an instance admin can just reset the account to turn it off and give me the account back that's horrible for security.