With the recent hack, there is now irrefutable proof of malicious actors trying to break Lemmy and steal user accounts. Please be careful about entering your password into random Lemmy apps!
With the recent hack, there is now irrefutable proof of malicious actors trying to break Lemmy and steal user accounts. Please be careful about entering your password into random Lemmy apps!
I think for a while leading up to the recent session stealing hack, there has been a massive amount of positivity from Lemmy users around all kinds of new Lemmy apps, frontends, and tools that have been popping up lately.
Positivity is great, but please be aware that basically all of these things work by asking for complete access to your account. When you enter your Lemmy password into any third party tool, they are not just getting access to your session (which is what was stolen from some users during the recent hack), they also get the ability to generate more sessions in the future without your knowledge. This means that even if an admin resets all sessions and kicks all users out, anybody with your password can of course still take over your account!
This isn't to say that any current Lemmy app developers are for sure out to get you, but at this point, it's quite clear that there are malicious folks out there. Creating a Lemmy app seems like a completely easy vector to attack users right now, considering how trusting everybody has been. So please be careful about what code you run on your devices, and who you trust with your credentials!
Sorry, but that's literally every online service. For example if you buy a new virtual server it takes like 5 minutes till a Chinese IP starts to try root passwords.
If someone actually wanted to harm Lemmy they'd just DDOS the biggest instances for a month (which would be easy, it's mostly single servers after all) or attack it with so much spam and large images that storage would break.
Indeed, this is a real weak spot with Lemmy's security. I honestly think we need to place more emphasis on implementing OAuth2, when I have the time I'll have to take a look at that again to see if I'm able to.
Me reading this post on an alpha app on testflight: chuckles I’m in danger.
Kidding aside, I used a dedicated email (and password) for my account and don’t plan to post any personal info on here.
Thanks for this!!
I feel like it raises somewhat the general issue of how much we're willing to live with complete mysterious anonymity from all of the developers and admins in the fediverse. I'm not saying that every admin or developer should have their real identity revealed and linked here. But there's a tension or issue here in how much it's normal and accepted and how much the fediverse in general wants to grow and attract users that are accustomed to trusting large companies that provide a different kind of base level trustworthiness than makes sense "out here".
If not links to real life identities (however trustworthy that can be in the limit), at least some connection to a broader online presence such that it becomes more likely the actor has something to lose in acting in bad faith (the lemmy core devs being a good example).
I don't have a solution ... but it seems to be a growing pain as this whole thing kind of grows from "hacker project" to "mainstream social media".
I've been wondering that myself. I've only entered my pw into Jerboa, which is made by the Lemmy devs (and Liftoff once, but changed the pw since).
Now I only ever use FOSS apps, which all seem to be under some amount of scrutiny, but idk how much is enough.
I've always been particularly wary of Voyager/wefwef. Not that I wouldn't trust the devs, but the whole concept of entering a password into a 3rd page that only passes it onto the right page, damn that's just dumb on principle.
It's particularly weird since this is home for so many techies and privacy/security advocates.
Trying to break Lemmy, yeah, let's prosecuted those bastards, but... WHAT. COULD. BE. MORE. WORTHLESS. than my account?
You are welcome to the scintillating points I have made. Bask in their brilliance.
Feels like this will be a very common occurrence with people rushing to build and use new apps, and host new servers. There are plenty of positives to fediverse vs centralized, but it doesn’t come without negatives.
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it's about time to change that password and i think lemmy team should have an option in the settings to revoke access we give to third party apps....not sure if that's possible
The greatest part of Bluesky/atProtocol vs ActivityPub is that they let you sign in to one account on any service on the protocol and it requires you to make separate app passwords.
Users getting invite codes every X weeks is nice for the server the require registration too
Apps are bloated(they store a lot of cache on the disk) , just use the website.
