WD My Book Live users wake up to find their data deleted

Mercutio

Fatwah on Western Digital
Joined
Jan 17, 2002
Messages
21,564
Location
I am omnipresent
Mine is the one true gospel. Verily, the world shall be made better when WD burns and is cleansed in righteous fire from this Earth.

I've been kind of wondering who those things are for, but ironically I know a few people who have them. They're all Mac/iPhone people who bought them to back up things they're already putting on Apple or Facebook's clouds. I read about how they work and apparently there's no direct way to set one up to sync data off a computer or mobile device. You have to either script it or buy a third party application to do it. I was thinking they worked like OwnCloud or something similar. Nope. They're just hard drives with enough smarts to log in to a web service. Kind of the worst of all possible worlds, given that this attack happened.
 

Newtun

Storage is nice, especially if it doesn't rotate
Joined
Nov 21, 2002
Messages
465
Location
Virginia
Hackers exploited 0-day, not 2018 bug, to mass-wipe My Book Live devices - Ars Technica:

Western Digital removed code that would have prevented the wiping of petabytes of data.​
. . .​
The vulnerability is remarkable because it made it trivial to wipe what is likely petabytes of user data. More notable still was that, according to the vulnerable code itself, a Western Digital developer actively removed code that required a valid user password before allowing factory resets to proceed.​
 
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