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.

      • donut4ever@sh.itjust.works
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        1 year ago

        Nothing works. Absolutely nothing. I tried to sign in on the web, it tells me to enter the 2FA code. I’ve never set 2FA. Tried to sign up with another email, it just errors out. I guess, that instance is just an impossibility now. Sh.it.justworks is the one I’ll continue using. This is so fucking stupid

      • whoamibro@lemmy.world
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        1 year ago

        Shouldn’t the client side be responsible for invalidating the cookies automatically when the backend API returns 401 Unauthorized?

      • donut4ever@sh.itjust.works
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        1 year ago

        That’s probably the only way to fix it. I think the admins nuked everyone’s account. I’ve cleared cache and data on the app and logged in, it keeps telling me “incorrect sign in”