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.
As I pointed out in the thread it was probably a few Lemmy users themselves that did it.
And some people do it for teh lulz.
Not everything has to be some conspiracy theory.
Yeah it seems like the attack wasn’t “malicious” per se in that the attacker didn’t seem to want to completely take down the site. They just seemed to want to mess with everyone by redirecting to lemon party and other mildly shocking things like racist remarks. Reads more like a bored person to me than anything.
2008 4chan humour
Gotta bring back the classics
Pool’s closed, sorry!
it doesn’t matter who, it’s the “why”. They get nothing from this, the only one who benefits from Lemmy going down is spez
I’ve sat at keyboards beside people studiously working their own. My presumption was that we were working on the same project. Then they have their AHA moment, and show me how they’ve hacked into our host machine.
They didn’t do it for money or to cause disruption. They did it to see if they could, and succeeding was reward enough. Then, happy as could be, they set off in pursuit of their next accomplishment.
Ya never know what’s going through others’ minds or what motivates them.
If anything an annoyed Reddit “hacker” doing it to see if they could and for the lulz