DAN GOODIN - ars TECHNICA




Western Digital, maker of the popular My Disk external hard drives, is recommending that customers unplug My Book Live storage devices from the Internet until further notice while company engineers investigate unexplained compromises that have completely wiped data from devices around the world.

The mass incidents of disk wiping came to light in this thread on Western Digital’s support forum. So far, there are no reports of deleted data later being restored.

All my data is gone

“I have a WD mybook live connected to my home LAN and worked fine for years,” the person who started the thread wrote. “I have just found that somehow all the data on it is gone today, while the directories seem there but empty. Previously the 2T volume was almost full but now it shows full capacity.”

Other My Book Live users quickly joined the conversation to report that they, too, had experienced precisely the same thing. “All my data is gone too,” one user soon responded. “I am totally screwed without that data... years of it.”

Multiple users reported that the data loss coincided with a factory reset that was performed on their devices. One person posted a log that showed unexplained behavior occurring on Wednesday:



“I believe this is the culprit of why this happens,” the person wrote. “No one was even home to use this drive at this time.”

The My Book is a popular storage device for consumers and businesses. It plugs into computers, typically through USB. The affected model, known as My Book Live, uses an Ethernet cable to connect to a local network. From there, users can remotely access their files and make configuration changes through Western Digital cloud infrastructure. Western Digital stopped supporting the My Book Live in 2015. The support forum thread was first reported by Bleeping Computer.

Disconnect now

On its website, Western Digital advised customers to disconnect their My Book Live devices to prevent further attacks while the company investigates the mass wiping.

In an email, Western Digital officials wrote:



The limited information available at the moment makes it hard to determine what is causing this mass data destruction. Western Digital’s statement seems to be saying that customer accounts were individually compromised. The advice to unplug devices while the investigation continues is warranted, and users should follow it as soon as possible.

In the meantime, My Book Live users are trying to manage the hardship brought on by the incident.

“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 need a remedy to this issue immediately as this is already incurring a great cost to me.”