Hi all,
If you’re just now signing in for the first time in 12+ hours, you may just now be finding out that Lemmy World and other instances where hijacked. The hijackers had the full abilities of hijacked user, mod, and admin accounts. At this time, I am only aware of instance defacing and URL redirections to have been done by the hijackers.
If you were not forced to sign back in this morning, contact your instance admin to verify mitigations were completed on your instance.
How?
This occurred due to an XSS attack in the recently added custom emojis. Instance admins should follow the issue tracker on the LemmyNet GitHub, as well as the Matrix Chat. Post-Incident Activity is still on-going.
Currently, it is likely that just your session cookie was stolen, with instance admins being targeted specifically by checking for navAdmin, an HTML element only instance admins had. I do not believe this to affect users across instances, but I have yet to confirm this.
What happens next?
As I am not the developers or affected instance admins, I cannot make any guarantees. However, here is what you’ll likely see:
- Post Incident investigation continues. This will include inspecting code, posts, websites, and more used by the hijackers. An official incident writeup may occur. You should expect the following from that report:
- Exactly what happened, when.
- The incident response that occurred from instance admins
- Information that might have helped resolve the issue sooner
- Any issues that prevented successful resolution
- What should have been done differently by admins
- What should be improved by developers
- What can be used to identify the next attack
- What tools are needed to identify that information
-
A CVE is created. This is an official alert of the issue, and notifies security experts (and enthusiasts), even those not using lemmy, about the issue.
-
A code security audit is done. This will likely just be casual reviews by technical lemmy users. However, I will be reaching out to the Mozilla Foundation and Cure53 as they recently did an audit of Mastodon. If there is interest in an external audit of lemmy and the costs are affordable, I’ll look into crowdfunding this cost.
This post is weird. You’re typing like you’re in charge of things, but you’re apparently not.
It’s one thing to show some initiative, but you’re literally demanding a full report like the Lemmy devs work for you. You sound like someone who does this kind of thing for a living and felt the need to flex. Because otherwise, what the hell are you even doing?
Setting neurotically-specific demands for the developers makes sense if you represent a big instance or something, but you’re literally just a dude. You could have framed this entire post in a different way and gotten away with it. Right now, it’s creepy to anybody who actually reads the entire thing.
I haven’t been able to change my password on Lemmy.world. When I click save, nothing happens and the password doesn’t update.
That’s probably something someone wants to look into.
had a login/not logged in loop for a while yesterday. reset lemmy.world site data seems to have fixed
Currently, it is likely that just your session cookie was stolen, with instance admins being targeted specifically by checking for navAdmin, an HTML element only instance admins had. I do not believe this to affect users across instances, but I have yet to confirm this.
Probably because the hackers used some http request to get the data and didn’t want to wade through thousands of rows of JWT strings.
XSS, Seriously?
To add context to this. What I’ve been told is that a community running on a lemmy fork with 5 digit users had used this code for a while and backported(?) the code upstream when they federated back. I guessing there was an assumption of safety as they had been using the custom emojis code for quite a while without it being exploited.
