It came as a nasty surprise for some users of Western Digital My Book Live’s network hard drives, whose contents were automatically erased remotely as part of their settings reset.
At random, some users of Western Digital My Book Live network hard drives have encountered a very unpleasant surprise of resetting their storage device to factory defaults with all their data erased. Their first instinct should have been to try to sign into their My Book Live account through the app or web browser, which ended up failing with the following error message: Wrong passcode.
On the Western Digital forums, it’s now fizzy. “I have a WD My Book connected to my home LAN and has been working fine for years. I just found out that all the data in it is gone today, while the directories seem to be there, but they are empty. Previously it was almost 2TB full, but now full capacity”, eg user concerns. Many messages of this type are listed. Among these users, some did a small survey and realized, By analyzing the user.log file, that sending a remote reset command that was triggered automatically was the cause of their problems.
Opening an inquiry by Western Digital
Were Western Digital servers attacked? Did hackers arbitrarily erase data without any specific prompt? For more information on this topic, Our colleagues from Computer I was able to speak with the manufacturer of My Book Live, who confirmed that an investigation had been opened to determine the exact cause of this wave of resets. The company advises disconnecting the My Book Live hard drives from the network until the light is shed.
“Western Digital has discovered that some My Book Live devices have been compromised by malware. In some cases, this hack resulted in a factory reset which appears to erase all data on the device. My Book Live received the latest firmware update in 2015. We understand that our customers’ data is very important. At this time, we recommend that you disconnect your My Book Live from the Internet to protect your data on the device. We are seriously investigating and will provide updates to this topic as they become available”, the manufacturer explains.
At the moment, we don’t know if Western Digital will be able to recover the deleted data of its NAS users from backups in its cloud infrastructure. Of course, we keep our fingers crossed for the sake of the people involved.
