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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

#661

Post by edgeform »

wycy wrote: post #591
8fingerlouie wrote: post #540

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I never jumped on the “everything IoT” bandwagon, but recently I’ve relented a bit. I own/use exactly 4 “IoT technologies”. I have smart radiator thermostats that turn on/off the heat based on family presence, as well as “predict” the heating needs based on weather forecast, sunshine hours, etc. I have a heat pump in my vacation house that is remote controlled by the internet. Not strictly needed, but very convenient…

How could an oven or washing machine possibly be useful remotely?! I'm a fan of connectivity, but that just seems absurd for those appliances.

> How could an oven

Starting pre-heat before you get home. Monitoring temperature away from home. Leaving a dish in the oven and starting it at a specific time, say an hour or two before you leave the office and head home for the day. Checking if you left the oven on after you left home.

> or washing machine

Notifications for the end of the cycle. Status of detergent levels if equipped ("Do I need fabric softener?" whilst at the store). Starting a load (similarly to the oven above) while you are on your way home so you don't end up with wet clothes sitting all day, so they're ready for the dryer when you walk through the door.

--

I get your popular cynicism, but c'mon now. None of the stuff I'm outlining there was researched, it was all off the cuff and I live in an apartment with "dumb" appliances from 1996.

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

#662

Post by ndesaulniers »

mandmandam wrote: post #652
ndesaulniers wrote: post #643

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're not wrong, Walter, ...

Imagine being that right, that often, on things that important - and being ignored / smeared / mocked for your trouble.

Forgive me, I forgot criticism amounts to sacrilege.

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

#663

Post by quenix »

MarkusWandel wrote: post #650

What I haven't seen in a superficial reading of this thread: Did the device really erase the data? A quick way to do this, nowadays, is to encrypt it and, upon reset, throw away the key. If it's an old school quick format, some types of data can be recovered. A tool like "photorec" can scan the drive and recover pictures, MP3 files and so on, mind you without original metadata like file names and dates. May be better…

I might be wrong, but isn't the "encrypt everything & delete key" method -way- more difficult to recover from than an actual disk wipe?

I mean, with a disk wipe, you can still try to recover some data using data forensics tools. If they key is done, you can have the best forensics team in the world, you can't decrypt the garbled data.

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

#664

Post by typhonius »

mandmandam wrote: post #652
ndesaulniers wrote: post #643

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're not wrong, Walter, ...

Imagine being that right, that often, on things that important - and being ignored / smeared / mocked for your trouble.

Like a modern day Cassandra.

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

#665

Post by wly_cdgr »

fallingknife_ wrote: post #587
wly_cdgr wrote: post #216

A good reminder always to have a minimum of two completely offline backups for any data you actually care about

yes, 2 of these WD My Book Live's would have assured data integrity. Oh, wait....

I said OFFLINE backups

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

#666

Post by jquery »

planb wrote: post #419
jquery wrote: post #284

Earlier quoted context omitted.

iPhones are subsidized by the App Store revenue.

No. iPhones are not subsidized. If the App Store ceased to exist this minute, Apple would still be making a hefty profit on every device sold.

I guess you know better than Tim Cook because that’s what he told Congress.

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

#667

Post by sellyme »

sokoloff wrote: post #460
sellyme wrote: post #347

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> But lifetime is evidently not as long as the device lasts, as we see with Microsoft. Plenty of XP machines are still alive out there and they have long been out of support. This will vary from jurisdiction to jurisdiction, but where I live, "lifetime" is defined as the period of time in which a product is reasonably expected to last. Talking about "XP machines" is a bit weird, because you're really talking about tw…

> If you buy a washing machine [here] and it breaks after 2 years, you're entitled to either a full refund, or a replacement. This really stood out to me. If I bought a washer here in the US and it broke after two years, I expect I’d be on my own. I’d be frustrated, of course, but I’d either fix or replace it and go on, probably not buying from that brand again. (Although, buying another brand could still get me the…

> This really stood out to me. If I bought a washer here in the US and it broke after two years, I expect I’d be on my own.

You probably would be. The US has by far the weakest consumer law of any Western country. Possibly the most egregious example of this is that businesses can advertise something as costing $5, you walk into the store with a crisp $5 bill to purchase it, and then get told that you don't have enough money.

Whenever this is mentioned online there's typically a flood of people who live in America commenting on how that's totally normal and "there's nothing they can do dude", completely oblivious to how absolutely mental that idea is to the rest of the planet. So I think your idea of it just being a case of growing up in a system without consumer protections making it seem normal is correct.

> I don’t feel like an insurance fight and waiting for a service call while I have a pile of wet laundry and another of dirty.

Ah, but here you've missed the trick! Yes, if your product broke and you needed to get a completely new one and/or a full refund, that's a pain in the arse. But it's an even bigger pain in the arse for the business, who functionally just lost the entire value of the product. They're incentivised to prevent that from happening.

The effect of this law isn't actually to give you an option if a product is broken (although it does that as well), the purpose of it is to make manufacturers stop selling broken products. Because they know that you can get a full refund for years after the point of sale, they make damn-well sure that the product lasts that long.

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

#668

Post by wingman-jr »

I have a WD MyBook and unplugged it last night - still fine, fortunately. I ssh'ed in and renamed the factoryRestore.sh and wipeFactoryReset.sh to cripple the attack as well as removing one drive from RAID until I can get an airgapped backup.

However, that doesn't fix the actual vulnerability itself. Anybody else affected have a suggestion for how to e.g. upgrade the relevant packages to make this secure?

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

#669

Post by tomnipotent »

numpad0 wrote: post #422
roblabla wrote: post #381

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

> lucky buyers were hit with better performances

Sort of. The WD Red drives outperformed actual 5400 drives but underperformed other 7200 drives by a large margin (180MB/s vs. 230MB/s), while not necessarily offering heat or noise benefits that matched. My current 8x8TB WD Red Unraid build will likely be the last WD drives I buy for a long time.

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