Unplug Quickly
If you were one of those that collects digital music, photos, and any other file type and has amassed a large collection of same, you have probably considered purchasing an external hard drive to bring your data out of the cloud, where it is not only vulnerable to potential server issues but potentially hackable. As the cost of storage has been declining since hard drives were developed, the cost of a 2Tb drive, a size reserved for server farms only a few years ago, is now available for $230 and a 3Tb external drive for ~$375. There are lots of hard drive manufacturers but Seagate (STX) and Western Digital (WDC) are the share leaders, so many branded consumer drives will be based on their devices, but a particular Western Digital product seems to be having a difficult time on its own.
Western Digital’s My Book and My Book Duo drives seem to have a vulnerability that allows access through commands generated by ‘outside sources’ that cause the entire contents of the drive to be erased by executing a factory reset, unbeknownst to the user Western Digital has issued a notice to all users , especially those that have their drives directly connected to the internet, such as with a direct connection to a router, to disconnect their drives from the internet and follow steps to connect the drive directly to your computer via an Ethernet cable, rather than accessing the drive via a network or the internet.
According to the WD forum, multiple users have found their drives wiped clean while they were away from the system, with many unable to recover their data. Those most vulnerable seem to be those that enable port sharing, a way for multiple users (processes) to share a port and IP address. Using a technique called port scanning, hackers can find those devices that are using this protocol and access the drive with a relatively simple exploit. What makes this a bit unusual is that WD stopped supporting My Book Live in 2015 with one last firmware update and no breech of either cloud services or the devices has been reported. Of course those who have not backed up their drives are paying the price, but where do you backup a 2Tb drive to, another 2Tb drive or the cloud, which was the point of moving the data to the drive in the first place.
Western Digital’s My Book and My Book Duo drives seem to have a vulnerability that allows access through commands generated by ‘outside sources’ that cause the entire contents of the drive to be erased by executing a factory reset, unbeknownst to the user Western Digital has issued a notice to all users , especially those that have their drives directly connected to the internet, such as with a direct connection to a router, to disconnect their drives from the internet and follow steps to connect the drive directly to your computer via an Ethernet cable, rather than accessing the drive via a network or the internet.
According to the WD forum, multiple users have found their drives wiped clean while they were away from the system, with many unable to recover their data. Those most vulnerable seem to be those that enable port sharing, a way for multiple users (processes) to share a port and IP address. Using a technique called port scanning, hackers can find those devices that are using this protocol and access the drive with a relatively simple exploit. What makes this a bit unusual is that WD stopped supporting My Book Live in 2015 with one last firmware update and no breech of either cloud services or the devices has been reported. Of course those who have not backed up their drives are paying the price, but where do you backup a 2Tb drive to, another 2Tb drive or the cloud, which was the point of moving the data to the drive in the first place.
Western Digital - My Book Live and Duo - Source: Western Digital
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