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.

  • TheStarkGuy@lemmy.world
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    1 year ago

    Nah. There’s far too much risk for Reddit to be involved. If even one hacker spilled the beans it’d cause a massive panic for Reddit investors.

    • eating3645@lemmy.world
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      1 year ago

      “It would be extremely stupid and would inevitably backfire if reddit was responsible. Seriously, if spez has one ounce of foresight he would not be involved.”

      Well you have convinced me reddit is behind it.

      • TheStarkGuy@lemmy.world
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        1 year ago

        There’s a huge difference between alienating people in an effort to make the website profitable, and outright paying hackers to go after Lemmy, which would be a criminal action. Let’s not get all big brain on here and pretend Lemmy.world is a threat to Reddit and is pulling away tons of users, to the point that Spez needs it out of commission. I didn’t jump here from Reddit to promote conspiracies

    • SrElsewhere@lemmy.world
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      1 year ago

      It’s well established that Rdeadit* doesn’t make foolish moves. /s

      I’m not saying they’re behind this. I think they are not. But I’m not ruling them out because of their acumen.

      During the event a message flashed on my screen, “This website has been seized by Rdeadit for copyright violation”. That suggested two things to me. Rdeadit didn’t write that. Whoever did write it doesn’t understand how a domain would legally be seized.