FYI!!! In case you start getting re-directed to porn sites.
Maybe the admin got hacked?
edit: lemmy.blahaj.zone has also been hacked. beehaw.org is also down, possibly intentionally by their admins until the issue is fixed.
Post discussing the point of vulnerability: https://lemmy.ml/post/1896249
Github Issue created here: https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy-ui/issues/1895
I tried to reproduce the exploit on my own instance and it appears that the official Docker for 0.18.1 is not vulnerable to it.
It appears that the malicious code was injected as an onload property in the markdown for taglines. I tried to reproduce in taglines, instance info, in a post with no luck: it always gets escaped properly in the <img alt="exploit here"> property as HTML entity.
lemmy.world appears to be running a git commit that is not public.
It does look like most instances will be vulnerable judging by the fix. It’s not custom code; it’s in lemmy-ui proper.
It seems the database and the server itself is not compromised? Just an admin account that used to post a markdown XSS exploit?
Pretty much, and it’s not even XSS (it’s not cross-site), it’s just plain basic HTML injection breaking out of Markdown. At least as far as I was able to find.
XSS is a blanket term for vulnerabilities that allows attackers to inject client-side scripts. Looks like someone is already identified and submitted a pull request that contain a fix: https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy-ui/pull/1897/files
Last I saw, they were on 0.18.1, unless a very recent update was installed. Do you happen to have a full list of domains they were redirecting to? Just want to be sure they were only going to “harmless” offensive sites, and not something worse.
As for the version, my instance reports it as
0.18.1-2-ga6cc12afe
So it seems to be using some extra patches, but I can’t find that commit on GitHub which indicates it might not be public, or cherry-picked locally.
So with this in mind, either it’s just innocent performance patches, or someone potentially also introduced the markdown vulnerability.
Although it’s also entirely possible I suck and wasn’t able to reproduce it correctly/had wrong quoting or something. Hopefully the devs can shine some light in the details.
Only lemonparty (which then redirects to chaturbate) and the pedo image hosted in the pictrs of lemmy.world itself. I saw no evidence of anything else, as people said, it’s a pretty oldschool type of hack to disturb not spread malware.
But I didn’t dig that much further than that, and it’s only a snapshot of what I gathered before it got fixed. I Ctrl+F “lemonparty” in view source and pasted the JSON in VScode and that’s about it. Didn’t dig much deeper if that was just a red herring.
I actually consider it good news that the redirection is happening this way (something that can be done just by having the lemmy credentials of an admin) vs something indicating they have access to the server itself.
Yep, same. It was also the most likely scenario.
It looks like it was an individual admin getting hacked. Not good but not the worst. Most fallout will probably be whether their security practices were sufficient for an admin and whether lemmy has good enough contingencies for this sort of thing. Lemmy’s 2FA is probably a hot issue now though.
Yeah, I’ve been scared to turn on 2FA with all the reports of people being locked out:
The JWT are likely a hot issue, already some Issues on GitHub about them not being revoked properly.
