If you store / back-up your photos to a WD My Book - BEWARE!

[stuck]

If this has ben posted elsewhere on CiC I apologise for the duplication but if you have a Western Digital My Book you need to know about this:
https://community.wd.com/t/action-re...ive-duo/268147

There's more on DP Review:
https://www.dpreview.com/news/857444...connect-it-now

stuck

[DanK]

From what I've read, the problem arises only if you turn on the function that allows the disk to be read remotely, over the net. WD is telling people to turn off this function in the meantime.

[Manfred M]

I read that WD discontinued these drives back in 2015, so data on them is at risk due to age (hard drive failure).

Having a single backup on a device is going to cause the owner some grief at some point (that's personal experience).

[xpatUSA]

Having a single backup on a device is going to cause the owner some grief at some point (that's personal experience).

Excellent point!

I recall from writing ISO 9000 stuff about Control Equipment software - something like backed up weekly and stored on-site in a separate building and additionally off-site with a Document Storage company. And that was just a minimum to satisfy ISO inspection if I recall correctly from so long ago ... the Internet was only just starting back then ...

Meanwhile my external HD sits on a shelf in the same room as my computer so, when the fire happens, I'll be literally toast ...

[DanK]

According to WD, this problem is not related to age:

Western Digital has determined that some My Book Live and My Book Live Duo devices are being compromised through exploitation of a remote command execution vulnerability.....Additionally, the log files show that on some devices, the attackers installed a trojan with a file named “.nttpd,1-ppc-be-t1-z”, which is a Linux ELF binary compiled for the PowerPC architecture used by the My Book Live and Live Duo.

[Manfred M]

According to WD, this problem is not related to age:

No it wasn't, but my comment is that all these people are complaining (rightfully) that they have lost all their data.

My point is that having a single backup means they are likely to lose their data at some point due to drive failure. Using a device that was sold between 2010 and 2015 is likely getting close to end of life and the failure (whether it was a error on WD's part or a hack) likely only accelerated the data loss.

[DanK]

No it wasn't, but my comment is that all these people are complaining (rightfully) that they have lost all their data.

My point is that having a single backup means they are likely to lose their data at some point due to drive failure. Using a device that was sold between 2010 and 2015 is likely getting close to end of life and the failure (whether it was a error on WD's part or a hack) likely only accelerated the data loss.

Indeed. Except when I am away from home, I always have three copies of all of my files: one on my main computer, one local copy on either an external mirror or another computer (depending on the type of file), and a third in a cloud backup.