IMHO Mastodon needs to have some kind of automatic update scheme to roll out bugfixes to these kinds of problems quickly … if there are enough instances out there vulnerable to this or any subsequent issues like it, we could end up with a situation where someone starts coopting Mastodon servers as part of botnets and costing their owners a ton of money in bandwidth bills, getting them IP-banned in various places, etc. The only way to fix this is fast automatic updating.

You wouldn’t root a toot

Were any servers hijacked?

Very interesting! In the age of federated social networks it’s even more important that everyone create and use unique credentials on every instance and service they register with!