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.
Just curious if you turn yourself in to police everytime you speeding.
This is not about turning you in, this is about protecting your users who all possibly just became victims of a crime, and for good reasons it’s not fully upon you to decide whether the possible consequences of this are serious for those users.
It’s more that many people expect those handling their data to be seen to follow the correct procedures and be trusted to handle the data in a fair, transparent, safe and secure way - and in addition to protecting their users, companies are probably encouraged to abide by the regulations because it is very easy for anyone to report where they think action needs to be taken, and regulatory bodies may be more lenient where correct process has been followed.
If I chance a speeding or parking ticket I can’t be fined nearly 20 million pounds, although I wouldn’t trust some parking companies not to try it! (I’m not saying that would be the case in this instance.)
https://gdpr.eu/fines/