2y ago

Blåhaj Lemmy hacked

Hi everyone.

Lemmy had an XSS vulnerability and we were one of the instances attacked through this vulnerability. We had our homepage replaced by a youtube video.

The lemmy devs were quick to create a PR for this issue and we have patched our instance to fix it,

Also while I do not believe any login tokens were compromised, we have taken the additional measure of rotating our secret key, so everyone will have to login to the site again as your existing credentials will no longer be valid.

If login fails to work properly, you may have to clear your cookies for the site... it seems to get confused about whether you're logged in or not.

Sorry that this happened, if you have any questions please contact @ada@lemmy.blahaj.zone or myself.

54 comments

That's gotta be what, 4 hours from discovery to patch?
Impressive work from everyone nya :)
I love FOSS

Damn that was quick! I didn't even notice LOL if it wasn't for this post I would have thought that my account got logged off just for a bug :p
Thank you and the lemmy devs for being so quick!!

out of curiosity, what was the youtube video?
- By the way, I don't know if this is related but I have an issue now after this
  I can log in using the web app but in Jerboa when I log in I can see Im logged in but I when I try to do something like commenting it tells me I'm not, then after reopening the app I'm fully logged off again, has this happened to someone else?
  
  you gotta sign out the master key used to authenticate your session was cycled, so you need to get a new one, jerboa gets confused cuz it already has one but is no longer valid
  
  The master encryption key was rotated, meaning your current login creds/tokens are invalid and you have to login again.

Yeah thanks for being on top of things! That was a really quick fix by everybody. Glad to have this place back!

Yea how do I know you're not the hacker that's still in control? 🤔
- How do you know I haven't always been the hacker who's in control? :D
  
  😲 Oh no... Lol, that'd be funny tho

had to remove cookies from lemmy.blahaj.zonw for my login to work

Thanks for everything 💜

I can no longer access my blahaj account, which sucks because ive done alot on it. Im not sure if its because Blahaj is down or my account is gone, I just cant get into my account anymore.
- Yeah I cant even access the site anymore, even if I reset cookies.
  
  I'm having the same issue. I can't access the website at all and I definitely cannot login on my app (Connect). I've cleared my cookies several times and tried to access the page to no avail.
  
  I'm facing the same issue. I tried disabling JS by setting Blåhaj Lemmy to "untrusted" on NoScript, and this seemed to work the first time I tried it, but not any subsequent times.
  The message I see is, "There was an error on the server. Try refreshing your browser. If that doesn't work, come back at a later time. If the problem persists, you can seek help in the Lemmy support community or Lemmy Matrix room."
  Opening up the split console in Firefox Web Developer Tools, I see "500 Internal Server Error". Comparing and contrasting with lemmy.world, I don't see any other meaningful difference. I've also tried visiting Blåhaj Lemmy on Google Chrome on my Android phone, where I don't have any extensions, but that gave me the same error message.
  
  All i get is an unthemed lemmy error page.

@supakaity
Fittingly, given that the hack seemed to be through the custom emoji interface (?), this thread has some wonderful emoji action!!

Thanks for the reactivity and the transparency

Kept on having issues today but was finally able to log in. Glad to be back :)

What sort of YouTube video replaced the home page? I'm assuming it was some sort of shock/racist content.
- Not sure. I didn't load it.
- Puneet Superstar - rap god
  
  Fairly harmless choice by the hacker, though could be a bit of a jumpscare if you've allowed autoplay for blåhaj zone
- Some music video titled "rap god" or something.

I just had issues logging in, so I'm gonna make a comment in case anyone else is having issues.
TL;DR: Clear your cookies.
I couldn't log in from the main page, I would type everything correctly and it would give me a "logged in" popup in the corner, but I wouldn't actually be logged in. For some reason though I ended up being able to log in from my profile page though, but I wouldn't stay logged in unless I opened up my profile page and navigated from there. I was also able to log in from the main page while in a private window though, (incognito for chrome users) so I figured clearing my cookies would fix the issue. That's what I ended up doing, and I was able to log in from the main page and this time I stayed logged in. Sorry for the ramble, but I just wanted to put down everything that happened since it's clearly a bug with the site, and if someone were to fix this they're gonna want as much details as can be provided.

@supakaity that's a 500 ... Other source?

glad things are back to normal, hope yall harden security. Thanks for your work
- Well, I don't technically work on the lemmy codebase (I have my hands full with adminning 3 instances and working on Hajkey), but yes I agree it'd be nice if the lemmy dev team could spend some time reviewing and improving the security, in amongst all the other stuff they have to do since Reddit imploded.

Thanks for handling this super quickly! Y'all are the best!

Something still seems broken on the home page. Multiple browsers, clearing cookies, private mode, etc have the same error message. Voyager is also unable to log in. Memmy working ok.
Home page and almost every link from the home page look the same.
- Sorry about this. It was caused by an erroneous emojo making the site info endpoint fail to load. Issue is fixed now.
  
  I noticed right away, thanks for the hard work!

I had to completely reset my password to be able to log in, but I'm unable to log in anywhere except for where I reset my password. I've cleared my cache/cookies, I've cleared all data for any Lemmy apps I have, but it still doesn't work. Any suggestions?
- I'm having the same issue, I can only log in on firefox, nowhere else. I've cleared cookies for my other browsers and cleared the data for jerboa.

Eep. I'm glad that everything is back to normal sorry you had to deal with it. I was away and didn't get to use Lemmy all weekend so basically I feel like the guy in the Community gif that I always see online :P

Test

Interesting, took me a little.. but after 3 login attempts I was able to login

Many thanks for sharing and quick measures taken 👍 I tried to change my password now, but it doesn’t safe the new one in my personal settings. Is there anything to consider additionally?
- Not sure.
  Some people have had to clear cookies to get things working again properly.
  Are you getting an error message in the javascript console?
  
  Hi Kaity, thank you for answering so quickly and sorry took a while for me. I am using my iPad and it’s Safari. I noticed that everything seems to be a bit delayed, slow. I have again tried to set a new password and I tried to log out afterwards but the log-out somehow doesn’t work. I suppose there is a time limit to stay logged ans I will wait for that to try again the old and new password (today my Safari safed one worked thankfully)

I haven't logged on to instances for a week and everything is already on fire.
Looks like I missed all the fun.
- i don't use the main blahaj lemmy site so i probably would've not seen it anyway

54 comments