14 DAY TRIAL // People all around the world using Live Duo and MyBook Live woke up this week to discover that their drives had been totally wiped, says Forbes.
According to sources, the vulnerability is thought to have been discovered in 2018 and obviously, it was not addressed. The whole data set is gone, with little possibility of recovery. Your best bet would be to try a dedicated recovery software and see how much you can restore.
The attack that targeted Western Digital's hard drives impacted a significant number of users. Some users saved up terabytes of data in these devices, including pictures, personal or business papers, videos, and other kinds of files. The only guaranteed way to avoid having your personal data compromised is to disconnect your disks from the Internet or to set your router or firewall to prevent outside access.
Victims learned that the passwords had been bypassed, while their personal information had also been exposed. Moreover, an "invalid password" warning popped up after entering the credentials and the reset section was unavailable even after entering the default password.
Western Digital has published a bulletin on the subject
The incident started to surface on Western Digital's community forums, as users reported device wipes occurred as the week progressed. With more logs being uploaded, it became clear that the factory reset command has been triggered and all information wiped.
With the affected drives identifies, Western Digital suspects that the unprotected disks were discovered by port scanning. “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 company noted.
To Western Digital's knowledge, the cloud infrastructure remained unaffected and the customer data was not compromised. The same goes for firmware updates and other cloud Western Digital services.