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.

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.

Hi all,

I'm Rob Maehl, the developer of WhyNotWin11, MSEdgeRedirect, and a few other Windows apps. I'm currently in the process of adding @marsara9@lemmy.world's Search-Lemmy to MSEdgeRedirect which will allow you to search Lemmy directly from the Windows Start Menu. I had originally planned to add this feature for Reddit but we all know how that site ended up.

Currently, this feature is in the developer builds on my github. However, this feature won't be in the stable builds for a couple weeks. This is because the "preferred_instance" parameter is currently required in the URL, and I don't want to be yet another developer treating Lemmy.world as if it's the main instance. This should be fixed later on as the site will pull from a user cookie if this URL parameter is missing.

Hope y'all enjoy!