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.

    • Vamp@lemmy.world
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      1 year ago

      As I pointed out in the thread it was probably a few Lemmy users themselves that did it.

        • dingus@lemmy.world
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          1 year ago

          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.

      • Xero@lemmy.world
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        1 year ago

        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

        • SrElsewhere@lemmy.world
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          1 year ago

          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.

    • 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.

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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.