this post was submitted on 10 Jul 2023
419 points (98.6% liked)

Programming.dev Meta

2489 readers
1 users here now

Welcome to the Programming.Dev meta community!

This is a community for discussing things about programming.dev itself. Things like announcements, site help posts, site questions, etc. are all welcome here.

Links

Credits

founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
snowe
Ategon
419
FYI: Lemmy.world and other instances were hacked. Beehaw.org took itself down to mitigate risks (lemmy.world)
submitted 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) by varsock to c/meta
88 comments fedilink hide all child comments
 

Drawing attention on this instance so Admins are aware and can address the propagating exploit.

EDIT: Found more info about the patch.

A more thorough recap of the issue.

GitHub PR fixing the bug: https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy-ui/pull/1897/files

If your instance has custom emojis defined, this is exploitable everywhere Markdown is available. It is NOT restricted to admins, but can be used to steal an admin's JWT, which then lets the attacker get into that admin's account which can then spread the exploit further by putting it somewhere where it's rendered on every single page and then deface the site.

If your instance doesn't have any custom emojis, you are safe, the exploit requires custom emojis to trigger the bad code branch.

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Alright, so what do they plan to do? Compromise Lemmy, sure. Then what? What do they gain? Propaganda?

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Basically pull data on various accounts (IP address, activity history, etc), people, and trends. They could promote given posts or suppress posts or hide things from moderators. They could distribute whatever malware they might like, target specific accounts that way....

The possibilities are many.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago

Even so, it just seems like a lot of work and risk for something that would not be necessary to achieve those or similar goals. Besides, if word gets out that the software is compromised, then people will just stop using it. The much better/easier solution would be run scams, vote manipulation, etc as it doesn't kill your platform that you would then be using to push a goal or agenda.

The name of the game is to not be noticed. You have a bad user or instance, they get banned and make a new one. Compromising the whole thing though? That's one and done, especially where the Lemmy croud is a lot more tech oriented than most other platforms.

My point being that why compromise Lemmy for a short while then have it die vs playing the long game and have an ever increasing user base to scam, steal from or manipulate? It just doesn't make sense when you think about it.