Western Digital is forcing outdated My Cloud devices offline

Is your Western Digital My Cloud system presently offline? Don’t fear—the corporate isn’t struggling one other service outage. Rather, it’s a brand new measure to forestall exploits of safety vulnerabilities. If you haven’t up to date your system’s firmware lately, it’s being barred from entry to My Cloud.

As noticed by Bleeping Computer, Western Digital started blocking net entry on June 15 if the NAS unit had not but up to date to firmware model 5.26.202 (My Cloud) or 9.4.1-101 (My Cloud Home, SanDisk ibi). The software program updates had been launched on May 15, and embrace fixes for a number of safety flaws. One is rated as important severity. The coverage change was introduced in a safety bulletin earlier this week. 

While dramatic, Western Digital’s actions appear to be associated to its service woes again in April, when a hack led the corporate to take down its servers for over per week to finish remediation. The important severity challenge patched in its May 15 firmware permits unauthenticated code to be executed remotely on a My Cloud system—which may expose customers to threats like ransomware assaults.

Users can nonetheless entry information on offline My Cloud devices regionally. Access and administration of information by way of the online turns into out there once more after the outdated system completes a firmware replace. Affected devices embrace:

• My Cloud PR2100 – requires 5.26.202 or later
• My Cloud PR4100 – requires 5.26.202 or later
• My Cloud EX4100 – requires 5.26.202 or later
• My Cloud EX2 Ultra – requires 5.26.202 or later
• My Cloud Mirror G2 – requires 5.26.202 or later
• My Cloud DL2100 – requires 5.26.202 or later
• My Cloud DL4100 – requires 5.26.202 or later
• My Cloud EX2100 – requires 5.26.202 or later
• My Cloud – requires 5.26.202 or later
• WD Cloud – requires 5.26.202 or later
• My Cloud Home – requires 9.4.1-101 or later
• My Cloud Home Duo – requires 9.4.1-101 or later
• SanDisk ibi – requires 9.4.1-101 or later

Western Digital’s safety bulletins for My Cloud, My Cloud Home, and SanDisk ibi devices element tips on how to replace your system’s firmware. 

This coverage announcement intently follows current studies about Western Digital exhausting drive warnings, which, not like the firmware updates talked about above, don’t tackle any safety points. Even with out issues, some WD exhausting disk drives are flashing alerts after three years—and it’s inflicting the drives to cease working in Synology NAS devices. Synology is presently recommending that customers flip off the warnings to revive performance.

Author: Alaina Yee, Senior Editor