This issue is already quite widely publicized and quite frankly “we’re handling it and removing this” is a much more harmful response than I would hope to see. Especially as the admins of that instance have not yet upgraded the frontend version to apply the urgent fix.
It’s not like this was a confidential bug fix, this is a zero day being actively exploited. Please be more cooperative and open regarding these issues in your own administration if you’re hosting an instance. 🙏
IMO it’s not a good idea to be discussing attack vectors publicly when a number of other instances are unpatched and the exploit has been in the wild for less than a day.
I agree that admins need to work together, but discussing it in public on Lemmy so soon after the attack isn’t the way. There exists a Matrix channel for admins, that’s where this type of thing should go.
When a vulnerability at this level happens and a patch is created, visibility is exactly what you need.
It is the reason CVE sites exist and why so many organizations have their own (e.g. Atlassian, SalesForce/Tableau )
It is also why those CVE will be on the front page of sites like https://news.ycombinator.com to ensure folks are aware and taking precautions.
Organizations that do not report or highlight such critical vulnerabilities are only hurting their users.
It is common practice to notify affected parties privately and then give full details to the public after the threat is largely neutralized. Expecting public disclosure with technical details on how to perform the attack in less than 24 hours goes against established industry norms.
Exactly
Yes, the vulnerability is out there. Maybe the root cause actually introduced a LOT of vulnerabilities. The fix is being pushed at a frantic pace. To expect the devs to take time out of the mad rush to notify those impacted to do a proper writeup is just insanity.
The way I see it? This (hopefully) got fixed pretty much instantly and there is active work to get the fix applied by the people who need to apply it. That is what should be done. Give it a week or two to see how they handle the public disclosure side of things.
I strongly disagree with some of your points.
Yes, the vulnerability is out there. Maybe the root cause actually introduced a LOT of vulnerabilities. The fix is being pushed at a frantic pace. To expect the devs to take time out of the mad rush to notify those impacted to do a proper writeup is just insanity.
It’s not insanity. It’s called incident management and it’s something the development team needs to build a proper procedure around, given the expanded scope of this project. I agree that the devs working on identifying, mitigating, and fixing the vulnerability should not be expected to also handle the communication. They need to designate someone for that role.
A 0-day was actively being exploited in the wild. There was confusion, misinformation, and a general lack of information.
You need to:
- Indicate that you are aware of an ongoing problem and are working to identify it. This let’s people know there is an issue and that you’re aware of it. You can do this without giving specific details on how to replicate the exploit. This includes server admins publicly acknowledging that they are aware of the issue and will provide updates when they have them, to alleviate the concerns of their user base.
- Once a mitigation are known, you publish that, in as many channels as you need to get that information out to the people who need it. So that server admins are aware of what they need to do to reduce their risk.
- Once a fix is in place, you publish that, same as above.
The way I see it? This (hopefully) got fixed pretty much instantly and there is active work to get the fix applied by the people who need to apply it. That is what should be done.
And how do you know this since it’s not been communicated? Most of the information I (as a person running a lemmy server) have been able to glean is from random threads spread across random communities.
Give it a week or two to see how they handle the public disclosure side of things.
A couple of weeks for a postmortem. Sure. A couple of weeks for an active, in the wild, 0-day, to officially communicate that the problem exists and how to mitigate/patch it. Absolutely not. I still don’t see a security alert on the GitHub telling me I should be updating to <insert version> to patch an active exploit and it’s been how many hours now?
And if this were a large company? Yes.
This is an open source project with less than 200 devs with the VAST majority coming from two.
Part of this is very much the learning curve and why you should very much think twice about using open source passion projects in “production”. This is the kind of stress testing that comes from lemmy/mastodon/The Fediverse actually having users.
But also?
- It has been indicated that there is an ongoing problem and the fixes are (hopefully) done with frantic work based on https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy-ui/pulls?q=is%3Apr+is%3Aclosed
- Publish mitigation in appropriate bulletin systems: It is far from textbook, but this is a social media platform. Users are spreading word of mouth while devs do actual work
- Publish fix in appropriate bulletin systems: It is far from textbook, but this is a social media platform. Users are spreading word of mouth while devs do actual work
Most of the information I (as a person running a lemmy server) have been able to glean is from random threads spread across random communities.
So you are saying that you were told there is an issue. And you can do exactly what I did while writing this message: Check the github page.
Do I think the lemmy devs are doing everything by the book? Hell no.
Do I think, given the resources available and the timeframe of the attack, that they are doing it correctly? Yes. They identified the vulnerability, (hopefully) implemented a mitigation, and pushed that all within 24 hours. Popular docker containers have already been updated, users are spreading The Good Word, and so forth. And I would much rather they use their limited resources to focus on actual fixes than doing proper writeups, just so long as the fixes are getting propagated.
Optimally? I want those proper reports filed within the next day or two. Given that this is likely NOT a full time job and all the chaos of the past 24 hours or so? I’ll give them a week.
And if your complaint is that they aren’t behaving the same way large corporations and massive projects (that often became corporations) do? Maybe Lemmy is not for you. And I don’t mean that in an insulting manner. If I were tasked with finding a message board solution or whatever for my company, there is absolutely zero chance I would recommend Lemmy. It is not production quality.
But for shitposting and actively not providing PII or anything useful? Let’s see how things get hardened from here on out.
Is the project small? Yes.
Did it explode in popularity leaving the devs overwhelmed? Certainly.
Do I expect them to strictly follow established ITIL incident management? No.
Do I expect them to communicate in a consistent way when an incident happens? Yes.
I agree the primary developers should be left to fixing the problems but there are enough active members of that project that someone could have handled communication in a more concise and official way. I don’t consider random posts in asklemmy or selfhosting by random users just guessing to be a substitute for that.
If the project is going to persist and grow it needs to get better at that. Pointing it out isn’t shitposting.
Again, how many “active members” are likely to understand the issue well enough to make that report. Or are they going to need to use up the time of those core developers to understand well enough to write it up?
I’ve been through similar a decent number of times on the corporate side. Something has gone very wrong. People want answers. A good manager assesses the situation and responds back “Look, we know what is going on and all hands are on deck to fix it. Making a powerpoint is not fixing it. We’ll do a proper write up for next week but we can either have So and So fix it or report on it.”
Obviously that stops being an option as you begin impacting investors. But that is when it becomes a trade off of “Okay, Jen barely understands what Roy and Moss are doing. But she can say something that hopefully won’t be too wrong and then apologize and give a correction tomorrow”
But people very much don’t seem to understand how small this project is. Spend time with passion projects and “open source” projects that AREN’T on the scale of a small-medium sized company and you understand that standards are going to be lower because people have day jobs and so forth.
I mean, there is a reason reddit hired so many people over the years. And if you are going to jump down the throats of people who prioritize fixing an issue and counting on “active members” to notify users over writing up the reports that many of those users won’t even look at? You want a production quality piece of software. That means Reddit or Threads or Bluesky.
If this was not a zero day being actively exploited then you would be 100% correct. As it is currently being exploited and a fix is available, visibility is significantly more important than anything else or else the long tail of upgrades is going to be a lot longer.
Keep in mind a list of federated instances and their version is available at the bottom of every lemmy instance (at /instances), so this is a really easy chain to follow and try to exploit.
The discovery was largely discussed in the lemmy-dev Matrix channel, fixes published on github, and also discussed on a dozen alternate lemmy servers. This is not an issue you can really keep quiet any longer, so ideally now you move along to the shout it from the mountaintop stage.
This issue is already quite widely publicized and quite frankly “we’re handling it and removing this” is a much more harmful response than I would hope to see.
Hi, mod of a community on the instance in question here. Why is this response harmful? What should we have done instead?
I feel like it’s up for discussion here and you very well may stand by the response there, but IMO with how prevalent this issue is, a specific response of “we’ve disabled custom emoji” or “we’re upgrading to 0.18.2-rc.1 today” would have been more constructive and reassuring to users. Removal of the question and lack of details gives me a lot less confidence that the issue and fix are understood and doesn’t leave any room for that discussion.
It’s strange that they would try to bury this information.
The number 1 tool against future hacks like this is education.
IMO it’s not a good idea to be discussing attack vectors publicly when a number of other instances are unpatched and the exploit has been in the wild for less than a day.
I agree that admins need to work together, but discussing it in public on Lemmy so soon after the attack isn’t the way. There exists a Matrix channel for admins, that’s where this type of thing should go.
When a vulnerability at this level happens and a patch is created, visibility is exactly what you need.
It is the reason CVE sites exist and why so many organizations have their own (e.g. Atlassian, SalesForce/Tableau )
It is also why those CVE will be on the front page of sites like https://news.ycombinator.com to ensure folks are aware and taking precautions.
Organizations that do not report or highlight such critical vulnerabilities are only hurting their users.
It is common practice to notify affected parties privately and then give full details to the public after the threat is largely neutralized. Expecting public disclosure with technical details on how to perform the attack in less than 24 hours goes against established industry norms.
