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.
Thanks for the heads up. I was starting to get frustrated with not being able to upvote/downvote/subscribe/comment, but logging in again seems to have done the trick. Also, this is my first ever comment on Lemmy. Hooray.
EDIT: for anyone using Memmy on IOS, this might not be the only solution, but it is what worked for me - I didn’t see an option to sign out anywhere, so I went to the account settings and added a new account, putting in the details for my current and only account. Weirdly, this made my account show up as 2 separate accounts, which made the “delete account” button appear. I clicked delete on one of them and was immediately sent to the login screen. I logged back in from there and now things work fine.