URGENT: ContentDB security incident: 22–26 October 2026
An attacker gained unauthorized access to ContentDB’s servers and data, including emails, hashed passwords, and uploads. All users are advised to take action.
What happened? (All times in UTC)
An attacker broke into ContentDB by exploiting two vulnerabilities. One of these vulnerabilities was in a third-party component that we have reported to the maintainer. We will share more once they have been fixed and made public.
From 22nd October 13:00, the attacker had access to ContentDB’s internal configuration. We have confirmed that they used this to sign into a staff account. This configuration also allowed modifying uploads and sending emails, but we do not have any evidence that this took place.
On 22nd October at 17:35, coincidentally, we deployed a patch for one of the vulnerabilities. At this point, we did not know that it had been exploited already.
From 24th October 23:00, the attacker began to probe the system for remote code execution vulnerabilities.
From 26th October 00:15, we have confirmed that the attacker had full access to run commands on our server inside a docker container. This means that they will have had full access to the database and may have modified code that ran inside this container.
On 26th October at 09:00, we discovered the break-in and took ContentDB offline. We revoked all secrets, including sessions, API tokens, and GitHub OAuth tokens.
What may have been accessed?
The attacker had full access to the secrets, database, redis, and uploads:
- Account information: usernames, emails, and hashed passwords. Passwords are stored as salted hashes (bcrypt) and never in plain text. Strong, unique passwords are hard to recover from these hashes, but weak or common ones can be guessed. However, you should still assume the password you used is no longer safe to use.
- IP addresses, not linked to any account, of people who downloaded packages from ContentDB or viewed them in-game in the two weeks before 26th October.
- Uploaded packages and release files.
With the secret key, they could act on behalf of any account.
We’ve checked every upload against our backups and have found no changes. However, we haven’t ruled out the possibility that the attacker caused ContentDB to serve malicious uploads during the vulnerable period.
What should you do?
- If you use your ContentDB password on any other sites, or a similar password, you need to change it immediately.
- Watch out for phishing emails, especially ones that pretend to be from Luanti.
- If you downloaded from ContentDB between 22nd October and 26th October, you
may wish to check your downloads. We have seen no evidence of malicious
uploads but have not ruled it out. You may wish to:
- Redownload anything you downloaded during this time
- Compare content against the upstream source
- Compare content against the unofficial mirror: contentdb.milcho.org
- When ContentDB comes back online, you will be asked to reset your password and any API tokens you have.
What’s next?
We are replacing the vulnerable components, continuing the security audit, and are actively looking into preventing other incidents like this in the future.
ContentDB will remain offline whilst we make security updates. This is likely to take a week or more.
We are continuing with the investigation and will share more information when we can.
If you have any questions or concerns, or notice anything suspicious, please contact us at security@luanti.org.
