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WD My Book users wake up to find their data deleted

arstechnica.com

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Re: WD My Book users wake up to find their data deleted

#111

Post by userbinator »

djrogers wrote: post #109
haswell wrote: post #2

Very interested to see what the root cause ends up being - this is mind bogglingly bad. I know several people who use these devices because of their simplicity, and they’d be devastated. I run a FreeNAS setup at home on an HP MicroServer. From time to time, I lament the amount of time I’ve spent over the years maintaining it, and after a recent drive failure (and wishing for more performance), I started considering c…

> I know several people who use these devices because of their simplicity, and they’d be devastated. I can’t imagine a scenario where I’d rely on an 8-10 year old device that hadn’t received a security update in 6+ years…

There are countless systems out there which are far older and also more secure. Age is of zero relevance except to those who propagate forced obolescence, mindless consumption, and generation of massive amounts of e-waste. This "update mentality" is a cancer itself. Especially when this is supposed to be a simple device.

That said, relying on the same credentials for a long time is more problematic. My bet is on credentials being bruteforced, especially if many people have left them at their default or used easily guessable ones.

Re: WD My Book users wake up to find their data deleted

#112

Post by askvictor »

romwell wrote: post #60
askvictor wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's more nuanced than that. Many of those things you mention are backups, just not necessarily that reliable for certain threats. By your standards, you'd probably say tapes, removed from their drive, are a backup. Yet, buildings burn down, taking the tapes with them. If restoring backups from off-line, off-site storage is going to take days or weeks, then for some organisations, you may as well not have a backup. C…

I agree with what you say, I'm just nitpicking on differentiating redundancy from backups . Yes, a building with tapes can burn down. But whether it does so or not is not correlated with the state of the system that the original data lives on. Redundancy is a great step to prevent data loss. But redundancy won't do what a backup would: keep your data safe even if your system is fucked . Cloud sync is a double-edged s…

Agreed that RAID isn't backup, but other online systems, while not completely decoupled, are less-coupled, which serves as a convenient middle ground for some cases.

Re: WD My Book users wake up to find their data deleted

#113

Post by weikju »

user982 wrote: post #78
scorxn wrote: post #29

Almost bought one of these, but opted for a raspi and usb3 external drive instead. Works great with Time Machine. https://saschaeggi.medium.com/use-a-raspberry-pi-4-for-time-... was my guide, though I deviated by using ext4 instead of hfs, and didn't need avahi.

Ext4 keeps all of the HFS+ metadata and resource forks?

When Time machine backs up over Samba, it creates a sparse HFS+ disk image bundle on the remote drive. File are not backed up directly to the ext4.

Re: WD My Book users wake up to find their data deleted

#114

Post by sumeno »

userbinator wrote: post #111
djrogers wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I know several people who use these devices because of their simplicity, and they’d be devastated. I can’t imagine a scenario where I’d rely on an 8-10 year old device that hadn’t received a security update in 6+ years…

There are countless systems out there which are far older and also more secure. Age is of zero relevance except to those who propagate forced obolescence, mindless consumption, and generation of massive amounts of e-waste. This "update mentality" is a cancer itself. Especially when this is supposed to be a simple device. That said, relying on the same credentials for a long time is more problematic. My bet is on cred…

Age is of zero relevance for hard drives?

Re: WD My Book users wake up to find their data deleted

#115

Post by WalterBright »

crackercrews wrote: post #86
WalterBright wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> bit rot Hard disk drives go on sale regularly. I replace mine usually once a year or so. They're not expensive relative to the loss of the data. I just bought a 500G SSD drive on sale for $60.

Do people buy SSDs for backup purposes? Sure it's fast, but isn't it better to get 6x the storage for the same price?

These are small and very convenient, and don't need a power supply. Great for trip use. I wouldn't use them for long term storage.

Re: WD My Book users wake up to find their data deleted

#116

Post by steveBK123 »

ska wrote: post #53
james_pm wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Three copies or it doesn't exist. At least one should be elsewhere from the other two.

This is often stated as the 3-2-1 rule. At least: 3 copies, 2 different kinds of media, 1 copy offsite.

also different methods/software is important as you never know what bug may be lurking leading to bad backups

Re: WD My Book users wake up to find their data deleted

#117

Post by kwyjobojoe »

ineedasername wrote: post #57

Discontinued in 2015, so no security patches. That's the problem with all of these purpose built IoT devices, a general lack of security updates even when they're still supported, and of course no chance at all if 6 months or a year after you buy it they decide to drop the product line.

It runs Linux, and they could have at least opened up the firmware for opensource updating. WDs response to Windows 10 blocking network access because the My Clouds use an old version of SMB is to buy a new one (and trash working equipment) or enable a not particularly secure SMB version in Windows.

Re: WD My Book users wake up to find their data deleted

#118

Post by JKCalhoun »

gruez wrote: post #101
haswell wrote: post #2

Very interested to see what the root cause ends up being - this is mind bogglingly bad. I know several people who use these devices because of their simplicity, and they’d be devastated. I run a FreeNAS setup at home on an HP MicroServer. From time to time, I lament the amount of time I’ve spent over the years maintaining it, and after a recent drive failure (and wishing for more performance), I started considering c…

>Very interested to see what the root cause ends up being The article says: >Multiple users reported that the data loss coincided with a factory reset that was performed on their devices. One person posted a log that showed unexplained behavior occurring on Wednesday: I'm leaning more towards 0day than "software bug", mainly because I can't really think of a reason why a bug would cause the factory reset to get trigg…

> internet connected NAS

I am guessing this is normal? My data backups are offline. The idea of making my backups read/write on the internet seems insane.

Re: WD My Book users wake up to find their data deleted

#119

Post by technion »

haswell wrote: post #2

Very interested to see what the root cause ends up being - this is mind bogglingly bad. I know several people who use these devices because of their simplicity, and they’d be devastated. I run a FreeNAS setup at home on an HP MicroServer. From time to time, I lament the amount of time I’ve spent over the years maintaining it, and after a recent drive failure (and wishing for more performance), I started considering c…

QNAP's recent situation was hard to believe. Having only just fixed a significant SQL injection vulnerability[0], a spate of ransomware hit. It was originally announced to be this issue that people rushed out to patch[1].

It ultimately turned out to be a backdoor account[2]. Backdoors really upset me. Every reasonable "you can't blame people for mistakes" goes out the window when it's not a mistake.

Following the ransomware, they released an auto-installing malware remover. A Python script that detected one particular piece of code associated with this recent attacker. That malware remover was a python script full of vulnerable exec calls introducing multiple new RCEs.

[0] https://www.qnap.com/en/security-advisory/qsa-21-11 [1] https://www.qnap.com/de-de/security-advisory/qsa-21-05 [2] https://www.bleepingcomputer.com/news/security/qnap-confirms... [3] https://www.qnap.com/en/security-advisory/qsa-21-16

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