This post explains the incident well but long story short some hackers were able to compromise user and admin accounts through stolen authentication cookies on some instances.
Before things were clear on exactly how this happened, we pulled the plug on our instance to mitigate the risk. We probabaly should have hastily wrote an announcment post before doing that but the situation seemed critical so we didn’t want to waste any time.
Few hours later, people were able to figure out the issue and promptly fix it. Turns out this vulnerabilty could only be exploited if an instance had custom emojis which thankfully ours didn’t, so users using this instance should be safe from the hack. lemmy.fmhy.ml now runs on v18.2rc which has fixed this vuln to be extra secure.
Sorry for the downtime and we will try to communicate the problem better in the future.
P.S. After somone mentioned exploding-heads on a recent post and why we are still federated with it, we took some time to view it carefully and decided it’s an instance that systematically breaks our rules and to defederate with it. We will shortly post our defederation policy soon to give a better idea on how we will decide on which instance to defederate from moving forward.
Appreciate your proactive measures and quickly getting the server up again and patched. Also thanks to all of the admins for their hard work going into the server!
I support the decision regarding exploding heads.
Related… Has fmhy also blocked Meta/threads? While I don’t think we should be like Beehaw over here, there are certain places that deserve defederation and Meta/corporate interests are at the top of that list for me.
Right now it’s not even mastodon compatible let alone lemmy. There are some arguments on how federating with them will allow people to migrate to a more privacy respecting instance and still view threads content, and some users say this will allow them to still communicate with their friends who don’t want to switch away from threads.
So while we do lean towards defederating from it, it’s some months away before we need to actually decide and till then we are simply listening to and discussing both sides of the argument.
I also want to mention this happened at 2 or 3 AM EST, which only had 2 admins on, me and the hoster. I should’ve made a post, but given the severity, lack of info, and lack of staff members, we both decided to shut it down immediately until it was patched. I personally apologize for the downtime but I hope it’s understandable why we did it this way. In case something like this happens again, I’ll post it in the FMHY Divolt server.
Sometimes you unfortunately have to choose between safety and communication. In this case you chose safety, which even if it didn’t end up being warranted was the right call IMO. Thanks for putting in all the effort.
Not only understandable, but I’m glad that’s how you guys handled it. Leaving it up seems irresponsible to me, although I’m not blaming any admins who did.
thank you for being proactive and also admitting you can improve for future responses… awesome!
Thanks for doing your guys part.
Appreciate the hard work!
Thank you for making quick moves to protect us!
Thanks for the update.
+1 for a backup Mastodon account 🙂
Perhaps a mastodon account or something with a quick “yeah it’s down we’re working on it” so we don’t think the admin team have been captured by rogue elements and have been forced to work against their will to smuggle radioactive material 😉
Seriously nice work getting it sorted!
Appreciate all the hard work! And I’m sure as things go on, things will get easier to manage
I remember phpBB having a popular emoticon addon, or maybe arcade addon, that ended up compromising a few of the message boards I frequented in the early 00s. Times never change.
I can upload images in img section of the post but I can’t upload them in comments, “private” messages and bodies of the posts, is this related to this exploit and it was turned off on purpose or is it an unrelated issue?
so what security concerns should we be worried about? I didnt have my computer on or logged in, am I at risk of a virus or personal information being leaked or something?
Hey, compared to vlemmy this was nothing.
Ah good old censorship, always the answer
Deplatforming nazis works, if not associating with them is even deplatforming.
You can run your own instance and federate with whoever you want. That’s kinda how this works.
