rcmaehl

Think Automoderator but available to everyone (although bots would need some instance admin / community moderator approvals to prevent abuse)

Think Automoderator but available to everyone (although bots would need some instance admin / community moderator approvals to prevent abuse)

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:

1. 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

2. 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.

3. 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.

As a new Linux user at the time. I hated the look of Ubuntu 09.04 - 10.10 compared to Windows, but the netbook couldn’t run Windows for the life of it. I swapped back a more normal desktop around 11.04.

This is GNOME 2 + Compiz Config Settings Manager. I have the theme files for some of it SOMEWHERE

What I know so far:

• vlemmy is still "up" and intermittently accessible. It is running slow as hell, PLEASE DO NOT VISIT THE INSTANCE as it will likely only slow things down more and make it inaccessible again.

• Stripe, Librepay, and Github accounts are all closed. Closure date unknown
• Reddit account still exists and has been messaged
• No mentions of the instance in Element.io chats but still searching
• They have almost certainly NOT lost their domain. Who.is historical records show no ownership or nameserver changes.

I have some minor personal details I've found that I'll be deep driving on later, but it's 1AM EST. I'm heading to bed but will continue on the investigation around 9AM EST.

Update 1PM EST July 9th:

Hi all, I'm working through about 40 different potential leads right now.

Although I need some help! Specifically, I need people who have viewed !kerbalspaceprogram@vlemmy.net to check their browser cache for this image:

https://vlemmy.net/pictrs/image/928b2f95-a37c-4e94-bd70-bc014c8655d4.jpeg

You can do so using one of the following NIrsoft tools:

• Chrome: https://www.nirsoft.net/utils/chrome_cache_view.html
• Safari: https://www.nirsoft.net/utils/safari_cache_view.html
• Opera: https://www.nirsoft.net/utils/opera_cache_view.html
• IE / Firefox / Misc: https://www.nirsoft.net/utils/image_cache_viewer.html

I'm hoping since it's a historic image linked to their internet presence that it might generate specific leads.

I'll update more as things progress.

Edit: Yep, it worked. AND it duplicates notifications since they're comment replies

I see there's a section for it in the inbox, but I haven't gotten one yet so I'm not sure if it works. Does it only work in the local instance or across the fediverse? Is it only for comments, or does it include posts as well?