FYI: Lemmy.world and other instances were hacked. Beehaw.org took itself down to mitigate risks - eviltoast

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.

  • bioemerl@kbin.social
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    1 year ago

    And you’re aggressively confidently wrong. Evidence by the fact that you give literally zero reasoning.

    The fact a bug like this can happen is clear and obvious evidence for how these things can happen, and this was just stupidity, not targeted malice.

    • gravitas_deficiency@sh.itjust.works
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      1 year ago

      Lmao go touch grass my guy.

      It’s not a backdoor. It wasn’t malicious. Yes, some major contributors are tankies, but that doesn’t really matter. That’s the beauty of OSS: everyone can see the code, which means everyone can spot sketchy shit - either malicious or completely accidental - and fix it. The fact that a patch was published in a matter of literally hours is confirmation of this.

      If this was a malicious exploit, it’d have been obscured far more, it would likely encompass more than a handful of insecure data-handling statements, and we’d have seen a LOT more instances getting popped.

      • bioemerl@kbin.social
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        1 year ago

        It’s not a backdoor. It wasn’t malicious

        Read my comment again. I literally said this wasn’t. I said this is experience that it could be easily done in the future.

        everyone can see the code, which means everyone can spot sketchy shit - either malicious or completely accidental - and fix it.

        Didn’t help in this case. Open Source doesn’t fix malicious contributions, and when the project owners are the malicious source your have no safeguards. Trust is still essential.

        If this was a malicious exploit, it’d have been obscured far more,

        Ex-fucking-xactly

        • gravitas_deficiency@sh.itjust.works
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          1 year ago

          I’m not going to litigate the entire topic of trust within the context of software and systems engineering with you.

          This is the sort of Reddit interaction that I don’t miss.

          • bioemerl@kbin.social
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            1 year ago

            “I’m going going to explain why you’re clearly wrong and I’m clearly right because that would open me up to making arguments that can actually be argued against”.

            You treat open source like it’s a magic sprinkle to get trustworthy code. It isn’t, and when malicious actors control the code base and write the majority of the code it is hilariously easy to sneak many bugs in over the years. Even projects like Linux, run by people you can actually trust, have issues with third party contributors despite incredibly rigerous approval process.

            I’m damn well aware of how this works, and you believe open source gives you security that simply does not exist.

            • gravitas_deficiency@sh.itjust.works
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              1 year ago

              OSS is not magic. Never claimed it was.

              At this point, I am no longer sure what you’re trying to argue about.

              But regardless of the knowledge you may or may not have, your comment pattern seems to be that of a troll, so you get the honor of being the first user I’m gonna block on lemmy! <3

              • philm@programming.dev
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                1 year ago

                Haha, I came to the same conclusion, but to be fair he’s not from lemmy, he’s just a lost soul in the fediverse (nothing against kbin though) strenuously believing that the devs of lemmy have evil intent and sell us all to “communist china” lol.

              • bioemerl@kbin.social
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                1 year ago

                But regardless of the knowledge you may or may not have, your comment pattern seems to be that of a troll

                Yeah. “Reddit behavior”. Coming from the guy summoning every bad faith argument they can.