What is the attack vector here? Malware running in user-space or remote commands from the (compromised) mothership?
WD My Book users wake up to find their data deleted
171–180 of 701 posts
Re: WD My Book users wake up to find their data deleted
#172In other news- now is the perfect time to invest in a MyBook. The price will plummet now, and WD will receive such a reaming from this incident that it will never happen in the future... Hmm..
The prices of MyBook's have been through the roof the last few months because of Chia[0] farming. Most models literally cost almost twice what they did 6 months ago
Re: WD My Book users wake up to find their data deleted
#173Earlier quoted context omitted.
The affected model here, known as My Book Live, uses an ethernet cable to connect to a local network. From there, users can remotely access their files and make configuration changes through Western Digital cloud infrastructure. Western Digital discontinued the My Book Live in 2015. The support forum thread was first reported by Bleeping Computer. The affected product is not a drive but a NAS solution. In terms of be…
Well, the GP said "why should anyone ever again trust [Western Digital] to keep their data safe?" Using a Western Digital hard drive, internet connected or not, very much means trusting a WD product with your data. But I might be reading too literally. And personally, I do intend to continue purchasing Western Digital hard drives , just nothing internet connected, because I agree they're different products with diffe…
From the quote the user you replied to posted it looks as though this is a product that was discontinued six years ago.
Re: WD My Book users wake up to find their data deleted
#174Earlier quoted context omitted.
Any single backup is a stupid idea. Combine them, and you've got a great backup solution. Why would I keep important data in one physical location? My house could burn down tomorrow, but I'd still have my cloud backups. My cloud backups could roast in a fire tomorrow, but I'd still have my local backups. And probably several other cloud backups. If you put all your eggs in one backup, sooner or later, you're going to…
He only reliable backup mechanism is starting a successful cult whose main tenet is that your data is valuable communication from God, so that they continually duplicate it. Anything else will go bust long, long before the heat death of the universe.
"Anything else will go bust long, long before the heat death of the universe."
As opposed to what? I think you've got too much faith in your method.
Re: WD My Book users wake up to find their data deleted
#175Hopefully this flushes out the elephant in the room of the irresponsibility of manufacturers selling devices like this and then leaving the software unpatched / unupdated within a year or two of selling it.
Unfortunately this needs to become regulated. Either commit to "lifetime" updates (at least 10 years) or be forced to put a massive warning on the label advising the secure period for which the product can be used. Just like food has expiry dates, so too do these devices need them.
Re: WD My Book users wake up to find their data deleted
#176Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Why should anyone ever again trust your company to keep their data safe? Because if you need a hard drive, your options are pretty much Western Digital, Seagate, and Toshiba, and they've all had their own problems.
Seagate mitigated their most famous problems. They were a good bargain buy for a while after that as they tried to rebuild their brand. Issue is now they're too proud of themselves, you're better off buying something else. They might still be the cheapest per GB for certain sizes, just look at the backblaze stats.
What does "too proud of themselves" mean?
Re: WD My Book users wake up to find their data deleted
#177Almost 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.
This is what I did, too.
But use ext4 instead of HFS+, and use Samba instead of Netatalk. With HFS+, the bundle would get corrupt after a few days. With Netatalk, a sudden power outage would corrupt the whole thing.
Don't listen to 99% of blog posts on this. They all tell you to use HFS+/Netatalk. None of those authors have actually used that backup solution for any extended period of time, because if they did, they'd find that it's unusable. Use this one instead:
https://mudge.name/2019/11/12/using-a-raspberry-pi-for-time-...
Samba. Ext4.
Re: WD My Book users wake up to find their data deleted
#178Don't put all your eggs in one NAS.
I alway do scheduled backups to online cold storage like Amazon Glacier.
Re: WD My Book users wake up to find their data deleted
#179Just imagine if this also applied / applies to the firmware in their hard drives or associated OS drivers ....
Re: WD My Book users wake up to find their data deleted
#180Read this, then checked my old My Book Live. Sure enough... everything's gone. I just used it for continuous laptop backups over my LAN, so unless one of them crashes tonight, I should be good. But, this will certainly give me pause when considering WD products, and this type of product in particular. This is very bad, WD! Are your other products also vulnerable in this way? Why should anyone ever again trust your co…
You should trust anything connected to the internet. Demand a physical write-enable switch from your backup drive vendor.
A physical write enable switch? My computer is doing automatic hourly backups, how is that going to work?