Linked: “I’m totally screwed.” WD My Book Live users wake up to find their data deleted
Oh this is not good….
Western Digital, maker of the popular My Disk external hard drives, is recommending customers unplug My Disk 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.
Look, if you own one of these devices, you probably use It to plug into your network to be able to access files from any computer, or even remotely. That’s pretty cool. It’s also a risk. It’s connected to the internet. The devices were somehow reset and the data was deleted. Was it hacked customer accounts? An infiltration of the WD network, a completely mangled update? We don’t know, but what we do know is that storage device connected to your home network, and thus the internet as well, was vulnerable.
I hope the folks who lost data can somehow get it back. Losing data to a failure of any kind is a pain in the ass. On the other hand, if the ransomware plague has taught us anything, it’s to have backups, online and offline. Because anything connected to the infected device is at risk, but if I have a copy that isn’t connected to anything, it’s safe.
Yes, it’s more work. Yes, it takes time and effort.
So does figuring out how to deal with losing all of your data.
