External storage solutions like those made by Western Digital are meant to help users backup their data to an external source. This is done so that in the event their PC fails, they still have access to their data, but unfortunately for Western Digital’s My Book Live users, a number of users are finding that their drives have been wiped.This is according to posts on the WD forums in which users are waking up and finding out that their drives, for some inexplicable reason, have been wiped. According to one user, “I have a WD mybook live connected to my home LAN and worked fine for years. I have just found that somehow all the data on it is gone today, while the directories seems there but empty. Previously the 2T volume was almost full but now it shows full capacity.”
According to some, they believe that this might have something to do with a factory reset that was performed on their drives a few days ago. This seems to be done intentionally as opposed to being some kind of bug.
In a statement made by the company, “Western Digital has determined that some My Book Live and My Book Live Duo devices are being compromised through exploitation of a remote command execution vulnerability. In some cases, the attackers have triggered a factory reset that appears to erase all data on the device.”
They are also advising customers to unplug their drives from the internet for the time-being while they sort it out. We’re not sure if there is a chance that the data can be recovered, but we’ll wait and see if WD will do something about it.
Filed in . Read more about Western Digital. Source: arstechnica