Lemmy.world and another instance have been compromised

Time to move from banning to contacting authorities then.... spam is one thing. This is criminal.

Wait, was that the one that had a community list well into the twenties? Or was that someone else? I don't think all that stuff reached me, but I did hear about a wannabe powermod like a week and a half ago. Much good that does anyone in a defederated system.

This used an onLoad which isn't generally shown when you hover over a link in a browser. Most people, even devs, aren't going to jump on the console to check every link.

NoScript would probably have helped though.

If it's onload then simply viewing the image runs that script. Yikes.

lmao I'm so stupid I pressed on that image and now my account is compromised. oh well it forced to create another and this is my first hack yayyyyy!

Wtf how is this even possible? Are the Lemmy devs smoking crack? If you're going to run a reddit alternative, it may be wise to sanitize the fuck out of everything posted on there.

Here take this: 🙄

I have not seen any notice as to how either users or admins should mitigate the problem so far. Obviously, admins should update once a new release is out, but beyond that...

From an end-user standpoint, I would guess -- I have not looked at the code and have not been working on the security hole -- the following:

• This basically allows the attacker to masquerade as a currently-logged-in user who has viewed their link.

• Viewing content on a lemmy server while logged in as an admin right now is probably a particularly bad idea.

• I don't know what the full impact is for a regular user account, but it's probably possible for at minimum posts to be deleted, and posts to be made as someone. In kbin, my account shows my email address, so if lemmy does the same, it would be possible to link an email account used for registration with a username. If you used a throw-away email account that is publicly-accessible -- as I did -- that could allow for full account compromise.

• Viewing content while not logged in is probably safe -- maybe they can make Javascript run from a link, but without you being logged in, there isn't anything interesting that the attacker can do. If I were going to be viewing content on lemmy servers right now, and okay with being limited to lurking, I might do that for a few days until the issue is resolved and lemmy servers update.

• I don't know if kbin is vulnerable. It didn't accept the URL given in the bug as an example of a malicious URL when I tested submitting one, but it's possible that it trusts URLs coming from federated servers, which I did not check.

It’s worse than that. Until Lemmy is more mature, I would reccomend using the lite version of Lemmy, the JS-free version, for sake of client side security. Alternatively, or as an added point of security, the front-ends themselves should implement more sanitazion themselves. I’m willing to spend some free time vulnerability testing, but I would need a dedicated sand-box for that.

I have not de-federated other instances simply because lemdro.id is not vulnerable to this particular exploit

It IS intentionally down, post by the admins

If they changed their server token, which they would have done to reduce the chances of the hackers reusing the same account tokens, you need to refresh your browser cache/cookies.

On desktop, you can do this by hitting CTRL-SHIFT-R, and on mobile, you probably just have to sign out and sign back in again.

It's up again. If you use an app, delete your cache and log in again

I think you've never worked in software, or even used software, if you think paid close source apps don't have issues like this. They can be worse because they're written by interns and no one there actually cares, they just want their paycheck

yes and no: there are a couple of schools of thought!

of course, code by a lot of people without proper review is… risky

however, at least it’s able to be reviewed! and in time and with enough eyeballs, hopefully that code will become far more robust. that’s the benefit of transparency: anyone can review any line at any time!

remember: closed-source code as plenty of vulnerabilities too! just if we can’t review it, it’s much harder to work out what they might be… often, closed source vulnerabilities can exist for years without the vendor ever patching them because nobody is calling them out on it… hell, they can even know that their software is actively being exploited and just… not tell anyone

The two main Devs of Lemmy do this full time. They're not hired in a traditional sense, but the project is funded enough for them both to work on it as their full time job. Now, this isn't a problem with open source, I'm a professional software Dev and you would not BELIEVE how many enterprise, proprietary systems are still doing things like building SQL statements by directly concatening strings that come from user input (especially in enterprise software cause, well, who's gonna fuck around with it?). No, this is a problem of having this many eyeballs on you. The tiny little places they slipped up and didn't properly sanitize a user input string was found and exploited. Most proprietary systems do NOT reach this level of user count, and in particular Lemmy attracts a certain more tech-savvy demographic that would've found this sooner or later, malicious or not. Remember, this vulnerability was not just found, somebody was looking for it.

What karma? Spez started it by being a liar 🤷‍♂️ so I say it is natural that people stop supporting him.

I can sense tears and hurt through your, "lmfao"

Are you the hacker, who did this?💀