What you need to know
- Western Digital My Book Live owners have found their NAS empty or locked out.
- The company believes this to be an external attack with customer accounts compromised.
- Western Digital recommends all My Book Live owners disconnect NAS from the internet.
Western Digital makes some popular affordable backup solutions and the My Book Live is a decent solution for storing data. That was until reports came from owners who have recently found their NAS clean of all data. As reported by Ars Technica, it doesn't appear to be the case that anyone affected has managed to recover lost data.
Tracking the Western Digital customer forum, one NAS owner who has been affected even posted detailed logs of what occurred:
Jun 23 15:14:05 MyBookLive factoryRestore.sh: begin script:Jun 23 15:14:05 MyBookLive shutdown[24582]: shutting down for system rebootJun 23 16:02:26 MyBookLive S15mountDataVolume.sh: begin script: startJun 23 16:02:29 MyBookLive _: pkg: wd-nasJun 23 16:02:30 MyBookLive _: pkg: networking-generalJun 23 16:02:30 MyBookLive _: pkg: apache-php-webdavJun 23 16:02:31 MyBookLive _: pkg: date-timeJun 23 16:02:31 MyBookLive _: pkg: alertsJun 23 16:02:31 MyBookLive logger: hostname=MyBookLiveJun 23 16:02:32 MyBookLive _: pkg: admin-rest-api
Another owner posted a screenshot of their password no longer working.
It seems, according to reports from owners, that things are far worse with some even stating they haven't any cloud features enabled and still found their NAS to be empty. Western Digital is now urging all My Book Live owners to disconnect the NAS from the internet.
"Western Digital has determined that some My Book Live devices are being compromised by malicious software. In some cases, this compromise has led to a factory reset that appears to erase all data on the device. The My Book Live device received its final firmware update in 2015. We understand that our customers' data is very important. At this time, we recommend you disconnect your My Book Live from the Internet to protect your data on the device. We are actively investigating and we will provide updates to this thread when they are available."
Western Digital states the company is looking into the issue, but it's not immediately clear as to what is causing the removal (or deletion) of data on My Book Live NAS. We strongly recommend all owners of this NAS family to unplug their devices immediately and ensure you have backup copies of all your data. Back up your backups.
