this post was submitted on 10 Jul 2023
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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
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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.

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[–] [email protected] -2 points 1 year ago (10 children)

No. They didn't catch this. It compromised an administrator on a massive instance.

It wasn't intentional. It proves that when it is intentional it'll be easily done and it's a mistake to trust the Lemmy code base.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago (8 children)

And the problem was fixed right afterwards and is currently being pushed out for admins to update to. Look, like it or not, shit happens. Expecting it to be full proof is unrealistic. It is a young software.

Just because it happened unintentionally, doesn't prove that we can't trust the developers to not put back doors in. Even if they did, why would they? What is there to gain for the developers adding a backdoor to it? Versus the risk of doing so? Is it ever worth the trouble when it is very much possible to find out if they did?

Lemmy has no financial value. That is the point. We don't use credit cards here, people rarely use their names, email verification isn't mandatory on all instances, passwords are potentially useful but you still need to know who they belong to. It is just such a great risk to their reputation for such a small gain.

[–] [email protected] -2 points 1 year ago (7 children)

And the problem was fixed right afterwards

Which is expected. When it comes to security the fact it happened at all is the problem.

I don't expect the software to be fool proof. All software has bugs and problems, but this software is specifically developed by bad actors who will eventually use the platform to fuck you over.

Just because it happened unintentionally, doesn’t prove that we can’t trust the developers

The developers aren't trustworthy on the account of their extremist ideology, not on account of this bug happening. This bug is evidence that despite the fact that this project is open source you should not just brush off that extremist ideal as "no big deal".

Lemmy has no financial value.

And immense social value.

[–] leviosa 1 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

The developers aren’t trustworthy on the account of their extremist ideology...

What do you mean by that? Are they hell bent on using Rust Nightly and making overly-judicious use of .unwrap()?

edit: I see that you mean they are Marxist-adjacent.

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