Theoretically speaking of course ;)
If my home instance gets hacked, what’s the worst case scenario for my personal data?
Data collected by a standard Lemmy server:
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IP address of the device you’re using to access Lemmy
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Posts, comments, favourites, upvotes, downvotes, subscriptions, blocked users, blocked communities. This also includes PMs (don’t use Lemmy PMs, make use the fact that your Lemmy can include a link to a Matrix account!)
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Username, hashed password, email address if provided
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TOTP public key if you have 2FA enabled
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Your application if your server requires/required you to apply to register
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Avatar, profile description, account registration date
Installed apps may track more information (i.e. paid apps will probably collect some information so you can actually use the pro features, maybe device IDs, possibly advertising information if you can find a Lemmy app with ads)
Individual Lemmy apps may or may not collect more information; the code is open so servers can modify the source code if they so wish.
PM is a misnomer since it’s not really private. Direct message or DM would be more correct, on Lemmy, DM as if it would be shown in public.
Don’t forget email address if you have one for account recovery purposes
Good point, added it!
How does it not get PMs?
Are those local per device only?
In ActivityPub, PMs are just “notes”. They’re comments that don’t get posted in public, essentially. This has the (hilariously awkward) side effect of sending a copy of your entire private conversation if you tag a user you’re gossiping about, especially on Mastodon.
ActivityPub is not suited for PMs. Use Matrix, XMPP, Signal, or anything else instead. You’re one @someone@example.com away from sharing your message history.
I guess most people consider them to be a separate thing. I’ll add them to the list.
Well that’s a super good piece of information Holy shit.
Haha, neat. That’s good to know! I wish the Lemmy apps would stop advertising PM’s them.
I don’t think I ever PM’d anyone on Reddit unless it was /r/HardwareSwap anyways.
What is a matrix account?
Matrix is a decentralized chat service. It’s to Signal/Discord what Lemmy is to Reddit. It doesn’t interoperate with the Fediverse directly, but Lemmy does have a special field in the profile page to write down your Matrix account. What Matrix does have, is a chat system that’s actually designed for chat, which the Fediverse lacks by itself.
Like on the Fediverse, you pick a server to sign up with (matrix.org, matrix.infosec.exchange, there’s a whole bunch of them) and then you use it to talk to other people. Here’s a guide to joining Matrix if you’ve never heard of it.
If you don’t want to use someone else’s server, you can set up your own server if you’re technically oriented, like you can set up your own Mastodon or Lemmy instance. You can use it to put all manner of chat apps in one place (iMessage + SMS + Signal + WhatsApp + Telegram + Line + Slack + Discord) through bridges if you set it up yourself, or you can pay for a service to do it for you. Using bridges isn’t quite as easy and intuitive as using the native apps themselves, but Matrix to Matrix chats work excellent.
Matrix has individual chats, group chats, “spaces” (like Discord servers, but with the ability to group together “servers” and individual chatrooms in spaces of your own name and hierarchy if you wish). There are various apps to choose from (“Element” is probably the one you want), and all of it is end-to-end encrypted.
Alternatively, XMPP is an older protocol that offers many of the same benefits, but I don’t think it’s as popular these days. Various big open source projects switched to Matrix from IRC chat, which probably helped a lot with popularity.
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Email and hashed password. If you’re like most people and use the same password everywhere, they gain access to everything if they manage to crack it.
My paranoia about data breaches has gone down so much since I started using email aliases and a password manager
Thank you automatically created Bitwarden password.
Glad I don’t reuse passwords.
I always wonder about this though. Are hackers really going to manually test out my password in miscellaneous sites? How would they know what sites to try? And why me along the hundreds of thousands of passwords they would have stolen with mine? Seems like that’s something they would do if they’ve targeted a particular person, not if they’ve stolen a whole dump of credentials
No, that won’t manually test it in random sites. They will add this creds to their bot net to test Mandy specific sites like Facebook, Twitter, GMail, several larger financial institutions, and many others.
Always use different strong passwords and use MFA wherever it’s available. Security, like ogres, has layers.
They create giant databases of every breached password in rainbow tables from previously breached password hashes, and then try them all if they ever expose another breach. If they get a database in a breach they can try a lot, like trillions, very fast.
Re-using passwords makes things much easier for them.
Bots attempt passwords on sites’ login forms all the time but aren’t very effective. Usually have hundreds a day even when I had a wedding site not even listed on google. Probably only works for very short and frequently used passwords.
Does lemmy use a salt?
I don’t know, but given the fact that it’s 2023 and it’s open source, I’d say yes.
One would hope so.
Nothing. Everything your instance has is your IP address (mostly useless) and password hash (also mostly useless). Everything you have here is public. Maybe except your settings, like light/dark mode.
Password hashes are only useless if you have a good password to begin with.
If not, they can likely get your actual password from it if you re-use passwords etc.
Your email gets spammed, and your embarrassing subscription list and reading history gets forwarded to your boss/spouse are things that immediately come to mind. Also your PM’s if you use those. Lemmy should really rethink its privacy posture. Of course you should never share passwords between sites, so if your password gets cracked, it won’t be usable elsewhere.
Lemmy currently doesn’t have private communities afaik, but if it did, those would also be compromised.
Does it only keep the current email address, or a history of them? I am guessing some people who used emails with personally identifying information in the account name may want to switch to a proton mail account.
