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.

  • PolarBone@lemmy.world
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    1 year ago

    I’ve been unable to login on desktop since this happened. Only been able to login via Memmy on IOS.

    I put in my info and it kicks me back to the front page and doesn’t log me in.

    I’ve tried clearing cache too

    EDIT: Switching browser to Edge seemed to let me. Weird. Even reinstalled Firefox and still won’t let me.

    • NCC-1031-A@kbin.social
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      1 year ago

      Oh it’s worse for me. I can’t log in on my phone, I can’t log in on my PC. Apps say “null value”. If I try to make a new account it refuses to create it.

      It’s really shown me a problem with the fediverse at this point. What do I do about my account? I can’t log into it but the website has ZERO contact information to say “Hey I’m having this problem.” If you go to the whole Lemmy thing itself even THEIR contact thing is exclusively through the lemmy account.

      i’m having to use Kbin at the moment. I want my account back. I’m tired. I hate reddit and hate all this crap but how am I supposed to move to a fucking site that doesn’t fucking work.