A little off topic for most of us here on RBlind but still worth posting for our instances Admins/Mods if no one else.

My very basic account security advice for Lemmy Admins

Have separate accounts for the things you do on an instance:

  1. Only use Admin accounts for things requiring no less than an Admin to do.
  2. Only use Mod accounts for things requiring no less than a Mod to to.
  3. Use standard user accounts for everything else.

Be sure to log off of an account and close all apps and browser tabs and windows open when you used that account before trying to log in with a different account.

While there are a lot more things that can and should be done, using separate accounts is a good minimal place to start. It should help mitigate against UI exploits targeting admins account for compromise like we have seen with a few other instances recently.

Things can and probably will still go wrong but diligently using accounts of least privilege can helping reduce the risk of Admins getting caught up in some of the more simple traps.

  • ClassyHatter@lemmy.worldEnglish
    4·
    1 year ago

    Also be wary when using apps and especially when enabling push notifications. Lemmy API currently lacks any kind of support for partial access to an account (unless this has changed recently). So, apps cannot, for example, get read only access to your account’s inbox. Apps can get either no access or full access. When you sign up for push notifications, an authentication token is stored to the push notification server which gives full access to your account to who ever happens to get their hand on that token. If there, for example, happens to be a security vulnerability on the push notification server, it might leak those tokens.

    If you have enabled push notifications on some Lemmy app, and want to invalidate the token, you can just change your password.

    Here’s a post by Memmy for Lemmy’s developer about push notifications: https://lemmy.ml/post/1534493