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.

  • Carnelian@lemmy.world
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    1 year ago

    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

    • NaN@lemmy.blahaj.zone
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      1 year ago

      I just did edit account and then saved, it seemed to trick it into logging in again (secrets on my instance were also reset).

    • scarabic@lemmy.world
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      1 year ago

      Ah interesting. I’ve had multiple accounts from the start so it was much easier for me. Just removed my main account and added it back.

    • Pandantic@lemmy.world
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      1 year ago

      I did this, but I just didn’t delete either accounts and it worked fine. Idk if it’s detrimental to have two of the same but it worked for me.

    • LuckyLu@lemmy.world
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      1 year ago

      Interesting. Definitely could be made clearer, I’ll make a post on the GitHub later about some of my suggestions.

    • LuckyLu@lemmy.world
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      1 year ago

      Interesting. Definitely could be made clearer, I’ll make a post on the GitHub later about some of my suggestions.

    • JJROKCZ@lemmy.world
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      1 year ago

      Finally I found good instructions, was about to delete and reinstall until I followed this!