WD Drives Delete Everything

A vulnerability in the firmware on Western Digital’s My Book Live external HDDs lead to a number of owners waking up on June 23rd to find their drives had been wiped. WD promptly recommended disconnecting the drives from the Internet. There had been a simultaneous worldwide destructive attack by parties unknown. Two vulnerabilities were exploited. One, a known bug discovered in 2018, which enabled unauthorized remote access. More serious was the discovery that code to password-protect the factory reset had been “commented out.” Oops. WD is offering free data-recovery services, as well a tradein program. An apposite reminder to make backups.