While I was asleep, apparently the site was hacked. Luckily, (big) part of the lemmy.world team is in US, and some early birds in EU also helped mitigate this.

As I am told, this was the issue:

  • There is an vulnerability which was exploited
  • Several people had their JWT cookies leaked, including at least one admin
  • Attackers started changing site settings and posting fake announcements etc

Our mitigations:

  • We removed the vulnerability
  • Deleted all comments and private messages that contained the exploit
  • Rotated JWT secret which invalidated all existing cookies

The vulnerability will be fixed by the Lemmy devs.

Details of the vulnerability are here

Many thanks for all that helped, and sorry for any inconvenience caused!

Update While we believe the admins accounts were what they were after, it could be that other users accounts were compromised. Your cookie could have been ‘stolen’ and the hacker could have had access to your account, creating posts and comments under your name, and accessing/changing your settings (which shows your e-mail).

For this, you would have had to be using lemmy.world at that time, and load a page that had the vulnerability in it.

    • @vacuumflower
      1•1 year ago

      It’s not that simple, there’s a response of the “top 0.1%” moving their property elsewhere or distributing it by various legal means so that they’d have to pay less.

      In dumb terms, you have to design a system where 4 people collectively owning 4bln$ would pay the same as 1 person owning 4bln$. Not even mentioning that they can have N friends abroad.

      Also there are still “rich” people in Scandinavian countries, who may not directly own nearly as much as Bill Gates, but still have enormous power.

      Also this will, in fact, affect inflation.

      My point is - money represents power, which is convertible into other means, you can tax money or property, but you can’t universally tax power.

      Money-wise (as a universal equivalent in a non-coercive system) you can at least somewhat clearly evaluate that power. If you scare powerful people off to convert their power into more obscure media, you won’t have that clarity.

      So I don’t see this as a problem one can solve, but I see other problems more accessible, like patent\IP\trademark\certification laws.