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Hackers Are Factory Resetting Western Digital Hard Drives

Hackers Are Doing Factory Reset On Western Digital’s External Hard Drives

Data storage agency Western Digital’s cloud-connected My Book Live hard drives have recently been exploited and cyberattacked, which has left them with nothing. All their stored content has been erased, Forbes reported.  

The My Book Live series was released in 2010, and the devices received their final firmware update in 2015. This data storage platform was one of the best, and most relied upon platforms of millions which is now exploited and taken advantage of.

However, the MyBook device is a physical hard drive, which looks like any other standard gadget, such as an Xbox Series X; it is somewhat accessible via Western Digital’s My Book Live app.

Owners who were affected by the attack stated that the passwords for their MyBook Live hard drives no longer worked.

People who have been victims of this cyber attack said that the security key for their MyBook live hard drives stopped responding.

As many people started stating the same problem on the firm’s community forum, it came to the company’s knowledge that the infected devices have received a factory reset command, and none of those were company initiated.

On the firm’s forum, a user wrote “all my data is gone… I am totally screwed without that data… years of it.”

“This indicates that the affected devices were directly accessible from the Internet, either through direct connection or through port forwarding that was enabled either manually or automatically via UPnP.”

“The log files we have reviewed show that the attackers directly connected to the affected MyBook Live devices from a variety of IP addresses in different countries,” Western Digital stated.

Western Digital, however, stated that, fortunately, the hackers didn’t intrude into the company’s cloud infrastructure. The data storage firm also deems that personal user information was not compromised at all.

Bleeping computer wrote a report in which they talked about the fact that these affected files have been restored by some people using a free data recovery app such as PhotoRec. The report also states that this cyber attack is from the type tagged as CVE-2018-18472, which initially came to the fore in 2018.

Though it’s too early to say whether it was, indeed, the same vulnerability that the attackers exploited, the new attack highlights the potential dangers of publically disclosing vulnerabilities for devices that are no longer receiving updates.

In a grim development, western digital recommends that all users disconnect their MyBook live and MyBook duo live hard drive to save the data from being deleted without warning.  

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