Suboptimal ways to respond to a public security incident (lemmy.stuart.fun)

submitted 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) by andrew@lemmy.stuart.fun to c/selfhosted@lemmy.world

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This issue is already quite widely publicized and quite frankly "we're handling it and removing this" is a much more harmful response than I would hope to see. Especially as the admins of that instance have not yet upgraded the frontend version to apply the urgent fix.

It's not like this was a confidential bug fix, this is a zero day being actively exploited. Please be more cooperative and open regarding these issues in your own administration if you're hosting an instance. 🙏

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[-] GuyFleegman@startrek.website 1 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

This issue is already quite widely publicized and quite frankly “we’re handling it and removing this” is a much more harmful response than I would hope to see.

Hi, mod of a community on the instance in question here. Why is this response harmful? What should we have done instead?

[-] TragicNotCute@lemmy.world 1 points 1 year ago

IMO it’s not a good idea to be discussing attack vectors publicly when a number of other instances are unpatched and the exploit has been in the wild for less than a day.

I agree that admins need to work together, but discussing it in public on Lemmy so soon after the attack isn’t the way. There exists a Matrix channel for admins, that’s where this type of thing should go.

[-] andrew@lemmy.stuart.fun 0 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

If this was not a zero day being actively exploited then you would be 100% correct. As it is currently being exploited and a fix is available, visibility is significantly more important than anything else or else the long tail of upgrades is going to be a lot longer.

Keep in mind a list of federated instances and their version is available at the bottom of every lemmy instance (at /instances), so this is a really easy chain to follow and try to exploit.

The discovery was largely discussed in the lemmy-dev Matrix channel, fixes published on github, and also discussed on a dozen alternate lemmy servers. This is not an issue you can really keep quiet any longer, so ideally now you move along to the shout it from the mountaintop stage.

this post was submitted on 10 Jul 2023

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