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.
Very impressed by how quickly action has been taken by this and other instances to patch the issue.
Very, seems like great work.
Hijacking the top comment to say I had problems with logging in to Lemmy.world today and liftoff was failing in odd ways.
I had to go into my web browser and clear my site cookies for lemmy.world to let me log in there.
In liftoff I had to go into the app settings in android to clear the cache and then remove and re-add my account for it to be able to log me in. (Press and hold on the account to remove it)
I’m on iOS with the Memmy app. It’s a work in progress that’s officially unfinished so I’m not surprised but it has also been a bit buggy. Doesn’t seem that I can log out without deleting and reinstalling the app so hopefully this doesn’t happen too often XD
So I was actually just struggling with that myself, also in the Memmy app in case that isn’t clear
What I did was add my account (again)
There was no warning or anything, and it populated the list with two of me.
At that point, a “delete account” option appeared under both of them. So I guess in normal circumstances, it wants you to keep one account around at all times?
I deleted one of them, and the app basically reinitialized. Both were gone and it showed me the welcome screen.
I logged back in, and now everything is back to normal
I wish hackers would invest their time in clearing credit card debt, deleting hospital fees, or something else that actually serves the public good, instead of hacking ordinary people just trying to get by.
IMPORTANT ANNOUNCEMENT: My account was not among those hacked. Any random bullshit appearing in my post/comment history was written by me.
Huh, i think i got lucky by forgetting that there is something i can consume other than youtube
what steps are being taken to ensure it doesn’t happen again? was any personal data compromised for users?
Good point, I’ll update the post.
Thanks Ruud for fixing it! Just a reminder guys that If you are using a third party app you need to login again.
First - really good summary and sounds like everyone is working hard.
Cross posting the below comment.
Under GDPR if you have had a data breach you have a legal obligation to assess whether you need to report it and you must make the report within 72 hours of discovering the breach.
There are other types of reportable breaches too, I only mention data as it sounds most likely. You may or may not be subject to PECR which may also have been breached although less likely. I don’t really have enough familiarity with the regulation to discuss that one.
If you are not sure if there has been a breach you may also need to discuss it with the relevant body or make a report.
Please can you update what action you have taken regarding this and if the incident was reportable or not and the reasons why. Edit - from that new information, it sounds like this is a reportable breach.
For a full understanding, it would be good to know if you had 2FA enabled on the compromised account particularly as it had admin privileges and if so how 2FA was circumvented with this exploit.
It would also be good to know what measures you have in place to prevent the same or other malicious attempts on your Open Collective and Patreon accounts as issues with those are potentially more serious. They may not be vulnerable to this, but it is going to be reassuring to know there is good security practice, 2FA protection etc enabled and you have robust procedures in place.
