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

  • Candelestine@lemmy.caEnglish
    70·
    1 year 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.

    • hawkwind@lemmy.managementEnglish
      443·
      1 year ago

      All the bean memes are in danger! On a serious note, old-skool or not, it’s a huge loss of trust in something the community-at-large is excited to see replace reddit.

      • Candelestine@lemmy.caEnglish
        611·
        1 year ago

        Par for the course. This system will never be immune to things like that. That’s part of what happens when you decentralize your power. Instead of a single target that can be made highly secure, you have a distributed array of targets.

        People should certainly be engaging on here with full awareness of the reality of the Fediverse, not expecting reddit 2.0. We never will be able to offer exactly what they did. We’ll be naturally worse in some areas and naturally better in others.

        • Philolurker@lemm.eeEnglish
          20·
          1 year ago

          This is why I’m glad I made redundant accounts on multiple instances. When there are problems on lemmy.world, I can just hop on over to another. That’s never been an option with Reddit.

          Now if there was only a way to export or sync user settings like subscriptions, it would be perfect.

        • hawkwind@lemmy.managementEnglish
          9·
          1 year ago

          True that. If you look at posts on lemmy.world though, it’s clear their users (which is like 50% of Lemmy) have zero clue they’re defederated ATM, and probably many that don’t know it’s compromised.

          • Hexadecimalkink@lemmy.mlEnglish
            43·
            1 year ago

            Federation and decentralization are not Web 2.0 concepts. Just like people who first learned what a tweet and a follow were and all the other concepts of those social media platforms, they’ll learn the new paradigm. Or they won’t and we’ll stick to 2.0 platforms.

      • Cyyy@lemmy.mlEnglish
        71·
        1 year ago

        i did switch from reddit to lemmy.world because i expected it to be a safe alternative that would atleast pay a lot of attention to security. so yes, the trust in security is broken a lot with this. especially since it happend so soon after so many people joined. i already think about maybe making my own instance to keep my account safe in the future.

    • CMahaff@lemmy.mlEnglish
      222·
      1 year 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.

      • JackbyDev@programming.devEnglish
        41·
        1 year 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.

      • thanks_shakey_snake@lemmy.caEnglish
        2·
        1 year 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.