Beware! Cyberattack can delete your data; here is how to stop WD My Book NAS-type hackers in their tracks

How to stop a cyberattack? That is a question that is on users minds who have just lost their personal data to hackers. The people who were impacted were linked to WD My Book NAS. Here’s the latest news on what happened and how to stay safe. Or else your job, your money, personal life, all will suffer.

Western Digital's My Book Live NAS system.  (Western Digital)

A cyberattack has recently led many users to lose their personal data. They have suffered huge damage. The question to be asked, surely, is how to stop hackers? The most recent example of a cyberattack concerns WD My Book NAS. Now, online NAS (Network-Attached Storage) services are a good way for users to host their data using their own hardware, offering them the ability to back up and stream their videos and other content. However, there was a problem, a big problem. Why? Because no internet-connected device is hacker-proof or completely secure. This painful lesson was learnt by owners of Western Digital's My Book NAS. A recent cyberattack has been remotely wiping NAS devices from the manufacturer, and users have been complaining that their files are being deleted without their knowledge.

The company's My Book Live and My Book Live Duo NAS devices have been impacted by a cyberattack that was detected a few days ago, as reported by Bleeping Computer. The company recently issued a bulletin on the security issue, which advised users to “disconnect their My Book Live and My Book Live Duo from the Internet to protect their data on the device”.

“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. In some cases, the attackers have triggered a factory reset that appears to erase all data on the device,” the company stated in the bulletin. “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,” it adds.

The report states that the My Book Live and My Book Live Duo devices were targeted with a remote code execution (RCE) vulnerability that was used to trigger a factory reset which would erase all the data on the device. Depending on how much of the terabytes of storage was used by different users, there is no telling how many personal files could have been deleted as part of this cyberattack. However, the company says that the attackers did not compromise either user credentials or the company's cloud infrastructure and firmware servers.

How to stop a cyberattack by hackers

If you own either the My Book Live or the My Book Live Duo, you can disconnect your device from the internet and use this handy guide by Western Digital to connect your NAS directly to your computer until the company fixes the issue. If you were one of the users affected by the attack, you might also be able to recover files from the device using software like Piriform's Recuva or PhotoRec, according to another report.