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.

    • Antik 👾
      16•1 year ago

      Good call.

      However, that wouldn’t have prevented this from happening. Not even MFA can protect you in case of an exploit like this.

    • Meldroc
      5•1 year ago

      I’m not perfect as far as password opsec goes, but I did indeed use a randomly generated unique password here.

      Hell, even if your password safe is only what’s built into Firefox or Chrome, that’s still better than using easy-to-guess passwords or sharing passwords.

    • @peregus@lemmy.world
      1•1 year ago

      Good thing we all use randomly generated password

      And randomly generated emails! (Thanks to SimpleLogin!)

    • 🔻-_AnoN_-🔻
      -5•1 year ago

      Brave has a really good random password generator logged in and a password manager that is protected by a 24 character seed phrase