"S" in "IoT" stands for "security".
WD My Book users wake up to find their data deleted
401–410 of 701 posts
Re: WD My Book users wake up to find their data deleted
#402Earlier quoted context omitted.
12 years? Typical business life of a computer is 5 years. Typical service/support agreement is 1-3 years. Try getting Apple to address a failed hard drive that's 12 years old. They'd laugh in your face.
That... clearly isn't what GP is talking about? The word "software" was used.
Here is an at-the-time writeup of the unit in question:
https://www.wired.com/2012/02/wd-my-book-live-duo/
WD sells the hardware, hard drive, and software as one sealed unit. The part that fails first will be the hard drive inside. The unit shouldn't be end-of-life until it actually should be expected to fail. (WD claims the units were end of life in 2016)
Re: WD My Book users wake up to find their data deleted
#403Earlier quoted context omitted.
12 years? Typical business life of a computer is 5 years. Typical service/support agreement is 1-3 years. Try getting Apple to address a failed hard drive that's 12 years old. They'd laugh in your face.
My 15" 2013 MBP runs Big Sur just fine... Sure, not quite 12 years, but still
I have a 2010 MBP that I use as a print server... it still gets occasional updates.
Re: WD My Book users wake up to find their data deleted
#404Earlier quoted context omitted.
Public-facing Synology devices got hit in the past too, but they just used it to mine Litecoin. I think someone calculated it and figured out that it cost something like $400k in electricity to mine $100k of coins on the boxes. Aha! It was $600k in dogecoin in 2014 https://www.pcworld.com/article/2364120/hacked-synology-nas-... That’s worth around $125m today (assuming straight hodling).
And of course Qnap in the recent month. It keeps repeating, and keeps happening, and some ( me ) keep ranting about it and no one / company is doing anything much with it. Majority of people buy NAS only use it to access their Data within their internal network. But somehow they all include Internet / Cloud features as upsell.
Can you give a link to what is happening with QNAP? I have one and now I am worried.
Re: WD My Book users wake up to find their data deleted
#405According to Western Digital[1], the CVE involved[2] has been public and unpatched since 2019. That's insane. There's "we don't support end-of-life devices" and then there's "we refuse to fix absolutely critical, crippling security vulnerabilities in devices just a few years old." This is well over the line. I smell (but have no idea of the merits of) a class action lawsuit. [1] https://www.westerndigital.com/support…
Wow. This is the ultimate IoT failure scenario, the product is in use but no longer supported and an exploit can hit it from the Internet. I suspect there will be litigation, but I am not a lawyer. I will be interested to see it though, what is the responsibility for using things post end-of-life? What we might see is a new “your on your own” mode built into this sort of appliance that once EOL hits it asks you to af…
I am trying to get rid of any smart devices in my life. I need less things connected to the internet not more. I bought Bruce Shneier's "Click Here to Kill Everybody, and that just convinced me even more. Software is a weak point, and I'd rather have the least amount possible in my "mission critical" everyday life gadgets. I want single-purpose, purpose built devices that do that one thing very well, without connecting to the internet for a whole host of secondary, and mostly useless or even harmful surveillance, reasons.
Re: WD My Book users wake up to find their data deleted
#406Insurance companies should try to hire experts to improve digital security of their clients, and then sell some insurance covering this kind of loss.
I'm not really fond of insurance companies, but as long as there are no solid and MANDATORY security standards and practices put in place, nothing will change. Maybe government should just inspect and validate the sale of software if it's secure enough. Of course the process will involve more work, but it's not like the silicon valley cannot pay for this.
It's like we're at an age when the seatbelt and speed limits are not even made into laws, and we're still somehow surprised of accidents.
Re: WD My Book users wake up to find their data deleted
#407Earlier quoted context omitted.
EOL is 3 years after purchase (if bought in 2015)? Just imagine a car and after 3 years no more spare parts? Personally everything below 10 years sounds ridiculous to me.
With modern high end smartphone it's the same issue. At best you get 2 years of patchs now, which is ridiculous because they really expect people to be able to afford >700€ phones that often.
I think that's more a specific vendor / android thing?
I just bought a 2016 iPhone SE second hand. It's running the latest iOS 14 right now, and is officially supported on iOS 15 too.
Re: WD My Book users wake up to find their data deleted
#408Earlier quoted context omitted.
Wow. This is the ultimate IoT failure scenario, the product is in use but no longer supported and an exploit can hit it from the Internet. I suspect there will be litigation, but I am not a lawyer. I will be interested to see it though, what is the responsibility for using things post end-of-life? What we might see is a new “your on your own” mode built into this sort of appliance that once EOL hits it asks you to af…
When a car manufacturer sells a car, in many parts of the world they're supposed to still offer parts for it for 7 years after they stop selling it, by law.
But consumer electronics are written off on much shorter timeframes than cars. Are we going to require support for electronics for 7 years? I would be in favor of it, but I don't see it happen. Device was EoL in 2015, the vuln is from 2019, breach 2021. Even if we take the vuln date, that's 4 years after EoL. The question then becomes: is it reasonable to say that electronics are expected to have a life half of that of cars? I could argue both ways on this.
Re: WD My Book users wake up to find their data deleted
#409Earlier quoted context omitted.
Wow. This is the ultimate IoT failure scenario, the product is in use but no longer supported and an exploit can hit it from the Internet. I suspect there will be litigation, but I am not a lawyer. I will be interested to see it though, what is the responsibility for using things post end-of-life? What we might see is a new “your on your own” mode built into this sort of appliance that once EOL hits it asks you to af…
It's more like a business failure as in the decision to discontinue the devices were taken prematurely. But really as pointed out above, any IoT device will eventually have a security flaw discovered if updates are stopped. As a consumer the best bet is to switch to a supported device or disconnect the device from the internet.
As a consumer, this is the reason I have boxes with hundreds of £s worth of routers which I've taking out of commission, because the manufacturer stopped updating them.
This really shouldn't have to be a consumer issue, it's wasteful to have to replace something like a router after the short EoL and inevitable vulnerabilities are found.
Perhaps we need more modularity, so core components can be swapped out to upgrade them.
Re: WD My Book users wake up to find their data deleted
#410Earlier quoted context omitted.
Wow. This is the ultimate IoT failure scenario, the product is in use but no longer supported and an exploit can hit it from the Internet. I suspect there will be litigation, but I am not a lawyer. I will be interested to see it though, what is the responsibility for using things post end-of-life? What we might see is a new “your on your own” mode built into this sort of appliance that once EOL hits it asks you to af…
I am trying to get rid of any smart devices in my life. I need less things connected to the internet not more. I bought Bruce Shneier's "Click Here to Kill Everybody, and that just convinced me even more. Software is a weak point, and I'd rather have the least amount possible in my "mission critical" everyday life gadgets. I want single-purpose, purpose built devices that do that one thing very well, without connecti…
as most products become connected you will have to pay a premium for products that are not - especially as companies try to make profits from tracking (as in SmartTvs).
People who are not rich enough to buy everything single purpose will have to pick and choose.