Comment on Lots of dead Lemmy/Kbin domains have CNAME records pointing to a domain parking company
pcouy@lemmy.pierre-couy.fr 2 months agoI think they do get marked as dead after the Bodis subdomain does not act as a Lemmy instance. But I was wondering if a large number of instances “waking up from the dead” and acting maliciously could cause some trouble. Or would such “undead” instances pose no more threat to the fediverse than the same number of newly created malicious instances ? I’m mainly thinking about stuff like being in a privileged position to DoS most instances at once, or impersonation of accounts that used to actually exist on these “undead” instances
otter@lemmy.ca 2 months ago
From what I can tell, an instance is either ‘linked’ (federated) or ‘blocked’ (defederated) on Lemmy. Mastodon has some more granularity. If an instance came back as a zombie, it wouldn’t be any more powerful privilege wise than a new instance that is malicious. It would get defederated same as always.
What could be a problem is on the individual user level. Say that a lot of users sort their feed by subscribed. They are not affected by random instances coming and going. However, they will be affected if a bunch of their (dead) subscribed communities suddenly become malicious.
It’s an important point for sure.
Your sensitive data and logins are tied to email addresses, which are tied to domains. Lose your domain, someone can access everything.
pcouy@lemmy.pierre-couy.fr 2 months ago
I recently stumbled upon an article showing how bad this can be when the expiring domains are used for important stuff