• Candelestine@lemmy.caEnglish
    54·
    2 years ago

    Yea, I switched to this alt. It appears to be one of the assistant admins accts. Seems like an old fashioned anon prank, to me, they’re mainly just trying to make stuff offensive and redirect people to lemonparty.

    So, y’know, old school.

    I don’t know if any data is actually in danger, but I doubt it. I don’t see why assistant admins would need access to it.

    • CMahaff@lemmy.mlEnglish
      201·
      2 years ago

      My concern is that configuring the site to automatically redirect users sounds like they have pretty large control over the site - the kind of control that I would assume is usually limited to users with root access on the server.

      Obviously hope nothing of value is lost and that there is a proper off-site backup of the content.

      Edit: See Max-P’s comment, it looks like the site redirection was accomplished in a way that IMO suggests they do NOT have full control over the site. We’ll obviously have to wait for the full debrief from the admins.

      • thanks_shakey_snake@lemmy.caEnglish
        3·
        2 years ago

        Yeah the “redirect somewhere else” attack definitely doesn’t necessarily require any particular control of the site. Usually it’s noticing that you can trick some text into being run as Javascript, instead of interpreted as text… And then you just stick in a cheeky little <notarealscript>window.location = "https://www.badsite.horse"</notarealscript> into that spot.

        Then every time that comment, username, (in this case apparently) custom emoji, etc. gets loaded, whoops, the code runs and off you go!

        So no control of the site is required at all.

      • JackbyDev@programming.devEnglish
        3·
        2 years ago

        If it was just DNS that doesn’t mean too much. If it was just DNS it seems to be back up. It’s like changing the number in a phone book.

    • Vilian@lemmy.caEnglish
      5·
      2 years ago

      probably even the top admin don’t, it’s gonna be encrypted, so even they don’t know your password(except if they changed the code to store it in .txt) but always use differnt password in the internet

  • TheGreatFox@lemmy.dbzer0.comEnglish
    40·
    2 years ago

    Main instance hacked? Time to use an alt!

    The first hack is a rite of passage for every site that gets big. It means we’ve been recognized!

    Luckily, this seems to be a standard troll (with some tech knowledge) - they’ve defaced the site and put redirects to shock sites, rather than injecting actual malware or quietly collecting everyone’s passwords. This could be much worse.

  • bigben111@lemmy.mlEnglish
    381·
    2 years ago

    How did it happen and what does this mean for me as a user of lemmy.ml who also follows people on lemmy.world?

    • Stovetop@lemmy.mlEnglish
      46·
      2 years ago

      One of the admin accounts appears to have been compromised. The owner/other admins appear to be aware now because that account had its admin access revoked and offending posts are being removed.

      Definitely opens up a big question about the security of Lemmy instances that I am sure will be discussed over the next few days.

  • upt@lemmy.ml
    30·
    2 years ago

    Being a part of Lemmy in these early days has been kind of interesting, seeing all of the bugs and bits that will be ironed out over time. One day when Lemmy is as old as Reddit it will all be folklore. Maybe.

  • maegul (he/they)@lemmy.ml
    26·
    2 years ago

    Hmmm. Don’t know what the fall out of this will be. But a lot of lemmy is on that server. Unfortunately. Maybe we’ll learn a lesson in the value of decentralisation.

    Ruud also runs mastodon.world, FYI.

    • Vilian@lemmy.ca
      4·
      2 years ago

      was just some of the admin in the lemmy, i don’t think they share the same admins

  • RunAwayFrog@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
    17·
    2 years ago

    Don’t know if this will be relevant at all, but I’m almost hoping this will force Lemmy devs to abandon the obscure markdown crate they use for pulldown-cmark.

    Using an obscure markdown implementation just because it supports spoiler tags always sounded like a silly decision to me!

  • CMahaff@lemmy.mlEnglish
    13·
    2 years ago

    4AM in the Netherlands where the instance owner Ruud lives… hopefully his assistant admins can clean it up, but it might be a bit before he even knows anything is wrong.

    • Stovetop@lemmy.ml
      12·
      2 years ago

      It looks like they’re in the process. The compromised account was demoted from admin and I see posts are being removed. There will definitely need to be some sort of investigation into how this happened, though.

    • maegul (he/they)@lemmy.ml
      3·
      2 years ago

      Hmm. They seem to have cleaned up a lot of things by now. If federation is an issue that might something the hacker did? Though pausing federation as a precaution makes sense.