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 [https://lemmy.world/post/1293336]
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.
Notes: The vulnerability appears to be with Lemmy software, and other instances are possibly vulnerable until the Lemmy devs resolve it, however Lemmy.World has implemented their own fix in the meantime. It has not yet been ruled out if non-admin users have had their tokens compromised, but all accounts should be forced to manually log in again, as a preventative measure.