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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

#421

Post by sokoloff »

roel_v wrote: post #408
oblio wrote: post #312

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

NB: The average age of a car in the US hit 12.1 years last year.

https://www.reuters.com/business/autos-transportation/averag...

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

#422

Post by numpad0 »

roblabla wrote: post #381
tomnipotent wrote: post #344

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Because if you need a hard drive This is the third such major scandal from WD in as many years. First, selling SMR drives as CMR. Second, selling 7200RPM drives as 5400RPM. Now this. They've lost a lot of credibility, and I don't see any of the other manufacturers having issues rivaling WD.

> selling 7200RPM drives as 5400RPM I suppose you mean the other way around? Otherwise, what's the problem with selling a higher RPM device as a lower one? Isn't higher RPM better? (Genuine question, I don't know much about HDD).

It’s correct, and higher is better, 7K2 is faster and often longer lasting somehow. Generally better built. Downsides are noise, power draw and thermal.

They sourced drives from former HGST under WD but 5K4 we’re not available so marketing rebadged 7K2 as “5400rpm-class” and lucky buyers were hit with better performances.

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

#423

Post by cm2187 »

bryanrasmussen wrote: post #410
brobdingnagians wrote: post #405

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Tracking and ads. Now that your TV menus have ads embedded, it’s a small leap from there to have to watch a commercial before you can start your washing machine

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

#424

Post by gambiting »

ale42 wrote: post #383
SilverRed wrote: post #322

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Which is why I think if we are going to do IoT, it needs to all be behind some gateway designed by a company that will maintain security for decades. Make a NAS drive which exposes everything to the gateway without bothering for authentication and then let Apple/Google/Amazon work out how to defend access to the resource. Random OEMs are unable to pull off IoT safely.

The IoT device will still be connected to a LAN/WiFi network to access that gateway. Local attacks will still be possible (imagine a flaw in the TCP/IP stack, local firewall, or anything on that direction). And if that big company gets hacked (never say never), hackers would get access to a huge amount of devices ready-to-pwn. Not even thinking then about what this would mean from a privacy/mass surveillance point of…

I can kind of see a device that has no ports open on the local network, and just uses an always-on ssh tunnel to HQ to receive commands. That way it's not exposed to anything on the local network, and it's the company resources that would have to be hacked first.

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

#425

Post by phire »

gruez wrote: post #198
cmeacham98 wrote: post #194

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Seriously? What's the point of owning the hardware then, might as well just use Dropbox? Seems like you take on all the risk for essentially no benefit.

>What's the point of owning the hardware then, might as well just use Dropbox? Seems like you take on all the risk for essentially no benefit. Dropbox costs $120/year for 2TB. WD live looks to be a one time purchase price for however many terabytes you want.

Except turns out it wasn't a one-time purchase.

Turns out that if you wanted your data to actually be safe, you had buy a new device every time Western Digital dropped support and stopped releasing security updates (3-4 years after launch), copy your data across and throw out the old device.

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

#428

Post by dtech »

roel_v wrote: post #408
oblio wrote: post #312

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I'd argue that this is serious enough that EOL doesn't apply. Yeah sure EOL for updates, features, minor issues etc.

But this is literally "Anyone in the world can remotely make your product unusable and destroy everything on it while you use it as intended"

I don't care if a car manifacturer EOL'ed a car model, if an issue gets discovered that will make the engine explode at random they better do recall.

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

#429

Post by Y_Y »

pessimizer wrote: post #336
SOMA_BOFH wrote: post #270

Earlier quoted context omitted.

they said the same thing about tylenol in 1982.

Somebody actually poisoned Tylenol. People realize that all the food they eat could have been poisoned in the grocery store. There's no easy mapping to "every external hard drive manufacturer could stop updating their products and your data could spontaneously delete itself."

There have been incidents of (other manufacturers') hard drives shipping with pre-installed malware though [e.g. 0]. I think that's a good analogue for Tylenol.

[0] https://www.zdnet.com/article/malware-found-on-new-hard-driv...

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

#430

Post by LeonidasXIV »

andi999 wrote: post #392
bellyfullofbac wrote: post #390

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Pixel XL released October 2016 (from [1]), no guaranteed updates after October 2018 [2]. I looked at the Pixel 4, released October 2019, discontinued October 2020, no guaranteed updates after October 2022... [1] https://www.gsmarena.com/google_pixel_xl-8345.php [2] https://support.google.com/nexus/answer/4457705?hl=en#zippy=...

That is not at best, probably this is at worst. But thanks for the info.

In Android-land this is currently about the best actually. There is a chance of it improving over time as the updates will be decoupled from hardware support but the situation is markedly worse than on iOS.
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