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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

#471

Post by rswail »

freeone3000 wrote: post #282
ChuckMcM wrote: post #278

Earlier 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 think the issue here is "end of life" is defined way too soon for portable hard drives. The mechanical parts have a 4% annual failure rate, or a half-life of 12.5 years. The software should be supported for that long.

I think that we need to separate the life of the hardware (WD My Book) and the life of the cloud service (the "Live" bit).

The drives themselves and their function as a NAS on a LAN is still fine.

When "Live" EOLed, they should have turned off the servers and disabled the function. If they weren't going to service/support it anymore, then they should have been honest about it.

Of course, their consumers would have screamed, so they did the worst possible thing, kept the service running as-is and didn't make it clear that people were leaving themselves open to attack.

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

#473

Post by the8472 »

MattGaiser wrote: post #184
zmmmmm wrote: post #175

Hopefully 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…

That just effectively means a subscription. So your hard drive will be $100 + $10 a month.

There's no need to do that. They could render the internet connectivity part inert during the last patch when they don't want to maintain it anymore. Make it LAN-only. If the firmware is locked, unlock it so people can run their own stack.

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

#474

Post by mrspuratic »

oblio wrote: post #448
iSnow wrote: post #446

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's not exactly great, tbh. A car can easily run for 10y (mine is due for a replacement at 19yo), so 7y seems ecologically unnecessarily wasteful. I get that it doesn't make sense to offer parts for 20yo cars, but if we want to live in a sustainable future, people need to stop replacing cars after 5y or so.

My point wasn't clear. 7 years is quite a long time. And as far as I know in general they can't prevent after market parts being produced. So car manufacturers are forced to allow their cars to be repaired, not necessarily with their parts, a long time after they've stopped selling them. IT stuff should start following the same lifecycle.

7 years is a relatively long time for a product, but not necessarily for a car. The average car age at scrap time is 13.9 years (UK stats). [Wildly off topic ranting about the balance of embodied versus emitted CO2 for the typical ICE vehicle omitted. Clue: 10 years is about the break-even point.]

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

#475

Post by rswail »

majormajor wrote: post #46
WalterBright wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> cloud backups are likely going to be more reliable I've seen enough HackerNews articles: 1. My account got deleted and I can't find a human to talk to and all my pictures going back 20 years are gone! 2. A hacker guessed my password and deleted my online presence! It's all gone! 3. My storage provider went bust and all my stuff is gone!

If my cloud backup backend provider cancels my account, my backup software will quickly complain. There will be a window of exposure, but I can act quickly. If my backup harddrive is in the same house as my main storage and my house burns down, I'm fucked. If I'm fancy, I may have multiple backend storage providers, too. Lot easier to do that then to have multiple houses. I wanted to use a safe deposit box in the pas…

Companies like Iron Mountain provide this service to businesses. Even if a bank no longer offers safe deposit boxes (and you were relying on their "safe", which for small banks was an arbitrary thing), there are usually facilities in larger cities that offer the same sort of service.

Just went through this with my family (in Australia) when the local bank branch said they were shutting down the service. It was basically a locked room in their branch, there was no "safe" involved.

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

#476

Post by csnweb »

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.

Unfortunately the 3 guaranteed years of updates for pixels is pretty much the best in the Android world. There are very few exceptions like FairPhone reliably providing long term updates

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

#477

Post by the8472 »

thrdbndndn wrote: post #222
rantwasp wrote: post #211

Can't wait for my 3$ as compensation for losing all the data. Seriously now. A class action lawsuit should end with the culprit being out of business in cases of extreme negligence like this one. Anything less just incentivizes them to weight "risk/benefit" of not doing anything

>should end with the culprit being out of business I would agree if it's non-EoL products. This, not so much. Don't get me wrong, I'm not trying to say since it's EoL WD don't need to do anything. Just that the degree of seriousness of this incident changes with that.

That means their EOL policy was negligent. They should have shut down the remote access parts when they EOLed it. It's like leaving hazardous waste around when shutting down a factory.

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

#478

Post by OhNoMyqueen »

WalterBright wrote: post #23

> “It is very scary and devastating that someone can do factory restore on my drive without any permission granted from the end user,” one user wrote. I'll say again: backup drives must have a physical write enable switch on them. To all the people who argue against this - just you wait till it happens to you! Not having multiple backups is also a very bad idea. One day my 8T drive slipped out of my hand and smacked…

> Cloud backup is a stupid idea.

I don't know what you mean by "cloud", but an off-site backup is essential. Your home can be burglarized, or burnt down, or flooded. Basically anything you insurance covers for your home you should cover regarding your data.

> At any moment it could go dark, for any reason, and you have no recourse.

There is no difference between your backup going dark or your main data source going dark. The whole point is that the data is duplicated and the odds of both of them going dark at the same time is low. This only means that you should check your backup regularly.

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

#479

Post by figassis »

fallingknife_ wrote: post #125

Read 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…

I am afraid to buy WD drives since the mid 2000s. I used to store all my media in them, and with WD every 1 to 2 years, my drive would be corrupted to the point that it’d need formatting. Having to rebuild my collections multiple, with always “improved” WD models moved me away from them forever. I don’t even buy server grade WDs.

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

#480

Post by nextlevelwizard »

slipframe wrote: post #367
nextlevelwizard wrote: post #229

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You don’t have that either. Stop the FUD. Just don’t have your only backup be connected to the Internet with remote wipe capabilities

How many My Book customers would even understand the meaning of your [correct] advice? When companies fuck people over with a defective product, we should resist the urge to tell the victims to be more tech savvy and not use those sort of products. Particularly when those products are intended for the general public.

Problem is that whoever designed the system should have done a better job. Computers are still (and probably will always remain) a niche skill so the blame lies completely on the shoulders of the WD engineers/designers who left this option open on the device
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