September 20, 2022
Kiwi Farms, the internet forum known for organizing harassment campaigns against trans and non-binary people, has been compromised, according to creator Joshua Moon.
Moon asked users to assume that their Wiki Farms passwords were stolen, emails were leaked, and IP address on their Kiwi Farms accounts were leaked last month.
Moon explained that the attackers used the session hijacking technique to gain access to his admin account, which was made possible after the attackers uploaded malicious content to XenForo, a site Kiwi Farms uses to run its user forums.
The attacker used the access to Moon’s admin account to issue a command for XenForo to send the email address, username, last activity, and other details of each user. The file uploaded to XenForo ends in .opus, an extension used by certain audio formats. It was uploaded directly to XenForo and injected by a custom Rust-based chat program that Moon wrote to allow Kiwi Farms chats to interact with XenForo sessions.
Although the command to download all user data did not appear to be successful, the attacker was able to load the file, probably as an iframe. This resulted in certain users sending the attacker their Kiwi Farms authentication cookies, which compromised the administrator account.
The breach occurred after Cloudflare, a company that protects Kiwi Farms from distributed denial of service attacks, ended its partnership with the platform.
The sources for this piece include an article in ArsTechnica.
