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.
Very impressed by how quickly action has been taken by this and other instances to patch the issue.
Very, seems like great work.
I wish hackers would invest their time in clearing credit card debt, deleting hospital fees, or something else that actually serves the public good, instead of hacking ordinary people just trying to get by.
Thanks Ruud for fixing it! Just a reminder guys that If you are using a third party app you need to login again.
what steps are being taken to ensure it doesn’t happen again? was any personal data compromised for users?
Good point, I’ll update the post.
IMPORTANT ANNOUNCEMENT: My account was not among those hacked. Any random bullshit appearing in my post/comment history was written by me.
First - really good summary and sounds like everyone is working hard.
Cross posting the below comment.
Under GDPR if you have had a data breach you have a legal obligation to assess whether you need to report it and you must make the report within 72 hours of discovering the breach.
There are other types of reportable breaches too, I only mention data as it sounds most likely. You may or may not be subject to PECR which may also have been breached although less likely. I don’t really have enough familiarity with the regulation to discuss that one.
If you are not sure if there has been a breach you may also need to discuss it with the relevant body or make a report.
Please can you update what action you have taken regarding this and if the incident was reportable or not and the reasons why. Edit - from that new information, it sounds like this is a reportable breach.
For a full understanding, it would be good to know if you had 2FA enabled on the compromised account particularly as it had admin privileges and if so how 2FA was circumvented with this exploit.
It would also be good to know what measures you have in place to prevent the same or other malicious attempts on your Open Collective and Patreon accounts as issues with those are potentially more serious. They may not be vulnerable to this, but it is going to be reassuring to know there is good security practice, 2FA protection etc enabled and you have robust procedures in place.
Would it be a good idea to force a login if the users IP or device suddenly changes?
My IP changes daily, which is quite usual in my country.
With the JWT secret rotation, shouldn’t everyone be forced to re-login? I’m posting with my existing session without any changes.
It won’t even let me login, it gives me the green Logged on toast message but it doesn’t actually log in
Pardon the ignorance, but how do I know if I was compromised? what do?
If you opened an infected page they were able to use your session. That means acting as your account, including seeing and changing your settings. (Which could have allowed them to change your account email or password.)
Nothing beyond that.
I think this is a strong reminder: We shouldn’t put all our eggs in one basket. This will happen again. Unlike Reddit, we don’t need to concentrate all communities on one instance. We should all make an effort to spread out. Some other general use instances are:
Again, for those new, you can post content to any of these instances and interact with content from other instances at the same time, just like you can send an email from your Gmail account to your ProtonMail account.
Register on 5 so you’re vulnerable on 5, got it.
