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Yea, I switched to this alt. It appears to be one of the assistant admins accts. Seems like an old fashioned anon prank, to me, they're mainly just trying to make stuff offensive and redirect people to lemonparty.
So, y'know, old school.
I don't know if any data is actually in danger, but I doubt it. I don't see why assistant admins would need access to it.
All the bean memes are in danger! On a serious note, old-skool or not, it's a huge loss of trust in something the community-at-large is excited to see replace reddit.
Par for the course. This system will never be immune to things like that. That's part of what happens when you decentralize your power. Instead of a single target that can be made highly secure, you have a distributed array of targets.
People should certainly be engaging on here with full awareness of the reality of the Fediverse, not expecting reddit 2.0. We never will be able to offer exactly what they did. We'll be naturally worse in some areas and naturally better in others.
This is why I'm glad I made redundant accounts on multiple instances. When there are problems on lemmy.world, I can just hop on over to another. That's never been an option with Reddit.
Now if there was only a way to export or sync user settings like subscriptions, it would be perfect.
That's fair. I shouldn't have said "replace reddit."
idk, im surprised it took this long. there's a huge variety of admin teams with varying degrees of security awareness and it's been over a month since the first big influx of users started. it'll happen again too and probably not before too long
On the other hand, look at where we are. This is proof that one hack can't take down Lemmy.
My concern is that configuring the site to automatically redirect users sounds like they have pretty large control over the site - the kind of control that I would assume is usually limited to users with root access on the server.
Obviously hope nothing of value is lost and that there is a proper off-site backup of the content.
Edit: See Max-P's comment, it looks like the site redirection was accomplished in a way that IMO suggests they do NOT have full control over the site. We'll obviously have to wait for the full debrief from the admins.
Main instance hacked? Time to use an alt!
The first hack is a rite of passage for every site that gets big. It means we've been recognized!
Luckily, this seems to be a standard troll (with some tech knowledge) - they've defaced the site and put redirects to shock sites, rather than injecting actual malware or quietly collecting everyone's passwords. This could be much worse.
I tried to reproduce the exploit on my own instance and it appears that the official Docker for 0.18.1 is not vulnerable to it.
It appears that the malicious code was injected as an onload property in the markdown for taglines. I tried to reproduce in taglines, instance info, in a post with no luck: it always gets escaped properly in the <img alt="exploit here"> property as HTML entity.
lemmy.world appears to be running a git commit that is not public.
I actually consider it good news that the redirection is happening this way (something that can be done just by having the lemmy credentials of an admin) vs something indicating they have access to the server itself.
Yep, same. It was also the most likely scenario.
It looks like it was an individual admin getting hacked. Not good but not the worst. Most fallout will probably be whether their security practices were sufficient for an admin and whether lemmy has good enough contingencies for this sort of thing. Lemmy’s 2FA is probably a hot issue now though.
The JWT are likely a hot issue, already some Issues on GitHub about them not being revoked properly.
How did it happen and what does this mean for me as a user of lemmy.ml who also follows people on lemmy.world?
One of the admin accounts appears to have been compromised. The owner/other admins appear to be aware now because that account had its admin access revoked and offending posts are being removed.
Definitely opens up a big question about the security of Lemmy instances that I am sure will be discussed over the next few days.
I wouldn't assume reasons why or that it's fixed until that consensus has been more widely reached.
Definitely opens up a big question about the security of Lemmy instances that I am sure will be discussed over the next few days.
They added 2FA login to lemmy in one of the newer updates. Probably pretty pertinent for any admins to use it....
Not a whole lot - you might see some spam being federated from lemmy.world but I'd expect the lemmy.ml and lemmy.world admins will fix it, and them clean it up.
That's probably good stress test to figure out how to handle that.
God damn, spez-funded hacker groups already is trying to disrupt the resistance.
Hmmm. Don’t know what the fall out of this will be. But a lot of lemmy is on that server. Unfortunately. Maybe we’ll learn a lesson in the value of decentralisation.
Ruud also runs mastodon.world, FYI.
This is why it makes sense for communities to not all pile into one instance, it gives one instance admin too much power and responsibility over everything.
lemmy.world was briefly back to normal and there had been a post saying that everything was fine now - it's not.
The site has just started doing the same thing again.
Please do not try using lemmy.world for the time being.
the post saying everything was fine now was coming from the same account that was originally compromised
Being a part of Lemmy in these early days has been kind of interesting, seeing all of the bugs and bits that will be ironed out over time. One day when Lemmy is as old as Reddit it will all be folklore. Maybe.
This'll definitely be remembered. It's good for us, we needed the wakeup call.
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.
lemmy.blahaj.zone got hacked too, looks like the same people
They also changed the allowed/blocked instances to allow threads.net and defederate lemmy.ml, just like they did on lemmy.world: https://lemmy.blahaj.zone/instances
Huh... so this probably is more sophisticated than a single acct breach then. Lovely.
Yeah, I'd recommend any server admin that doesn't have 2FA turn it on ASAP until we know what their exploiting
4AM in the Netherlands where the instance owner Ruud lives... hopefully his assistant admins can clean it up, but it might be a bit before he even knows anything is wrong.
Don't know if this will be relevant at all, but I'm almost hoping this will force Lemmy devs to abandon the obscure markdown crate they use for pulldown-cmark.
Using an obscure markdown implementation just because it supports spoiler tags always sounded like a silly decision to me!
Just went there and didn't immediately see anything out of the ordinary, but then was redirected to Chatroulette, lol yikes
Damn first vlemmy.net (my original instance) dies, and now one of the largest is hacked…
Yea, bad timing it seems, especially as lemmy just got on top of its scaling issues.
They seem to be unrelated. The vlemmy story is mysterious, unless something new came out, but either their home server died or they got scared of whatever bad/illegal stuff landed on their home server and just wiped it all and walked away. A bad story that shouldn’t happen, but, if true, a bad admin that we are probably better off without unless they do things somewhat better.
The lemmy.world story seems to be that an admin had their credentials hacked. Not good but also somewhat ordinary. Hopefully they just need some better security practices. There are questions around how much lemmy the software contributed to this hack and how much it can prevent a rogue admin from causing damage. I’d bet that there are improvements to be made but that in the end any admin of anything is a vulnerable point of attack. This may just be an individual’s bad luck or bad practices.
For me, it highlights the issues with having relatively centralised instances like lemmy.world. One admin gets hacked and a quarter of lemmy is under their control!
The real issue IMO is that recent events have pretty much proven that both big instances and small instances are problematic for different reasons.
For those not aware, the beehaw server did intentionally shut their instance down to avoid any issues.
See announcement here: https://hachyderm.io/@beehaw/110687918465426082
The admins now appears to have taken down the backend in an effort to stop the defacing.
