[ALERT] Lemmy.World Compromised - PLEASE READ FOR YOUR SAFETY

Aer@lemmy.worldmod to Mildly Infuriating@lemmy.world – 30 points –

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.world/post/1287053

Be alert, Please do not launch a new tab of Lemmy.World. Having tabs already open with this site is fine but as soon as you do you will be bombarded with awful content with malicious intent to cause shock, disgust and distress.

In the meantime use alternative instances, other instances are not affected by this compromise. Do not open any links/posts from the user MichelleG.

Thanks for reading, please stay safe out there Lemmy users!

Update: Lemmy World is under attack again.

Update: I am not a super code-literate person so bare with me on this... But. Still please becareful. There appears to be a vulnerability.

Users are posting images like the following:

https://imgur.com/a/RS4iAeI

And inside hidden is JavaScript code that when executed can take cookie information and send it to a URL address.

Among other things. At this time if you see an image please click the icon circled before clicking the link. If you see anything suspicious, please report it immediately. It is better a false report than a missed one.

26

This is all part of growing pains on a new admin suddenly owning the top lemmy instance because they knew a little bit about branding.

As I’ve said before, I’m giving the admin a couple months and I feel they’ve done a fantastic job already.

I think this carrying on without providing more information is reckless. Does an actual admin from this instance really know what happened or are you just taking a bunch of random commentary and speculation as gospel then telling the users "we're good."

I am a moderator of this community, not an admin of Lemmy.World

I know about as much as you. The difference is I have been spending time researching and discussing findings with other mods rather than sleeping which is what I should be doing.

I found critical information that I thought important to share. That is all there is to it. If you do not feel safe using Lemmy.World you should login to another instance.

The owners of Lemmy.World are also in the EU so are likely still asleep or awake and trying to figure this shit out.

You do you. I would tell my users I have no idea what's going on, and definitely not say "using your open tabs is probably fine."

The attack involved a redirect that only affected pages that were freshly opened. If you had tabs that were opened before the attack no redirects happened, no malicious URLs of the sort. It showed the website as it was normal.

That statement was in fact true. The attack only happened when you opened a new tab of Lemmy.World

I'm checking on mobile web browser atm, everything seems fine.

Things are slowly getting restored, the mod that was compromised has been removed. Hopefully nothing more happens. I'll unpin this post as soon as I am 100% sure on that though.

Thanks for helping take care of it, that was a pretty quick response from you guys. I'm betting the talk for the next day is gonna be all about 2FA. lol

Why the hell do people have to be complete assholes? I had just clicked a link and got all the crap, then couldn't go to the homepage or any of the posts in my history. I thought I got a virus until I tried it on my other device.

Honestly should be just as illegal as vandalism.

I mean it kinda is, the hacker exposed potential children to p*rnographic content.

Let this be a lesson to all. Use long passwords with a password manager to deter brute force attacks. Use 2FA for your account. It's security 101.

It is concerning as I have received a message from a compromised admin 1 hour ago telling me that an app developer wanted me to help them with mod tools.

Hard to know if this is genuine or not, but given what has happened I am going with an attempt at breaching my account.

Going through an app also prevents the awful redirects.

Speaking of apps. Seems like this is a possible attack vector.

Maybe a malicious actor copies code of one of the popular apps (Voyager/wefwef), adds code to extract JWT token or whatever auth token, gathers list of high value targets (admins / mods of large instances or communities), then hijacks instance.

Very easily could have been much worse. On the flip side, glad it was just a script kiddie