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  • Swear this is the same guy that did the trending community spam a few days ago, he was angry about being banned for squatting on known subreddit names here on Lemmy, even the compromised admin account said something about it in her comments before this happened šŸ¤¦ā€ā™‚ļø

    • 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.

      • His username at the time was ā€œLMAOā€ and I think soā€¦ he did it again on another Lemmy instance but used a different username that time as well šŸ˜‚

  • Hey everyone, this exploit was present in the custom emoji feature of Lemmy. Because lemdro.id does not use custom emojis, we are not vulnerable at this time.

  • Did this result in Lemmy.world being defederated from Lemdro.id?

    Lemmy.world is back up and the hack is over, but when I view !android@lemdro.id using my lemmy.world account I can't see anything.

    EDIT: In case anyone else is having this problem, the issue was my language settings. Despite having ā€œUndeterminedā€ set as a language, that was the problem - I clicked the little ā€œXā€ to unselect all languages and then saved, and now itā€™s working again.

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

  • Deeply unfortunate that something like this could happen, you always hope that code injection vulnerabilities are found before someone is hacked. With that in mind, this shows the importance of two security principles: always parse and clean user input and don't click links (including images) before checking where they are going to send you.

    • Itā€™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. Iā€™m willing to spend some free time vulnerability testing, but I would need a dedicated sand-box for that.

      • The ansible method of setting up a lemmy instance generally "just works". I set one up for federation tests with kbin recently.

  • In all seriousness, no one is talking about this, but this is the one disadvantage of open source software being developed by volunteers, we don't know exactly how the admin accounts were hacked but the XSS stuff is really basic stuff, none of those fields were sanatised at all, and it makes me concerned what else has been missed, obviously the advantage of open source is in time this stuff can get fixed, but this is what happens when loads of people who aren't experts contribute to a site.

    In comparison to sites where there is a fully hired developer team the quality of the code is significantly better. I really hope the passwords were hashed on these instances and the hackers didn't get plain text passwords or anything really bad like this.

    One thing and credit to Ernest, as I've contributed there he does very thorough code reviews and his quality of code is very good, its why im confident kbin won't be hacked.

    • 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

      • I concur that the security behind closed doors I've seen is often non-existent. The incentives are typically stacked against security.

      • I work at the biggest software company in the world.
        Sure there is projects with security flaws, but at the company I work, there is zero tolerance to big security flaws in the code, we have many automated checks, as-well as manual checks.

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

      of course, code by a lot of people without proper review isā€¦ risky

      however, at least itā€™s able to be reviewed! and in time and with enough eyeballs, hopefully that code will become far more robust. thatā€™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 canā€™t review it, itā€™s much harder to work out what they might beā€¦ often, closed source vulnerabilities can exist for years without the vendor ever patching them because nobody is calling them out on itā€¦ hell, they can even know that their software is actively being exploited and justā€¦ 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.

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