On Saturday 26th June, Western Digital sent out an announcement stating that they have 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.
In the announcement, they also mentioned that, “their investigation of this incident has not uncovered any evidence that Western Digital cloud services, firmware update servers, or customer credentials were compromised. As the My Book Live devices can be directly exposed to the internet through port forwarding, the attackers may be able to discover vulnerable devices through port scanning”.
Today, Wednesday 30th June 2021, they’ve advised the following:
Immediately disconnect your My Book Live device from the Internet to protect your data from ongoing attacks. You can disconnect the device and continue to access your data locally by following these instructions on our Knowledge Base.
We are here to help. Although this product family is no longer sold or supported by Western Digital, we know some of our customers have been impacted and we want to help. If you have lost your data as a result of these attacks, we will provide data recovery services which will be available beginning in July.
We know how important your data is to you and are committed to helping you protect it. We are launching a trade-in program that will allow you to upgrade from your My Book Live to one of our supported My Cloud devices.
We will provide details about how to take advantage of these programs in a separate email.
The vulnerabilities being exploited are limited to the My Book Live devices, which were introduced to the market in 2010 and received a final firmware update in 2015. These vulnerabilities do not affect our current My Cloud product family. The latest information about this incident will be available on our Product Security Portal. If you need any additional help, please contact our Customer Support team.
If you have a Western Digital My Book or My Book Live device that you have configured to access over the internet, you should take action immediately. If you use it locally within your own network and it is not accessible over the Internet, you do not need to do anything.
If you are unsure or still need assistance, please contact us today to speak to one of our Network and Storage experts.