According to a report from Gizmodo, users first noticed their hard drives being remotely deleted on Wednesday. Since Western Digital is still investigating the incident, the only solution right now is to unplug your hard drive from the internet for the time being. “We have determined that some My Book Live devices have been compromised by a threat actor,” Western Digital’s Jolin Tan told Gizmodo. “In some cases, this compromise has led to a factory reset that appears to erase all data on the device.” Lifewire reached out to Western Digital for updates on if/when the issue would be fixed, as well as how many people have been affected, but so far has not received a response. Gizmodo notes that users have been sharing their experiences with their hard drives being randomly deleted on a WD community thread this week. There even have been warnings on Twitter about the hacking. In the WD community thread, some users said they lost years of data, including photos of kids and weddings, after receiving different types of error messages. “Tried to access some files via the iPhone app but got an error message saying ‘unable to connect.’ Assumed it was just a Wi-Fi/network issue but when I tried to access the drive from my PC using a shortcut everything was gone except for (empty) default Public folders: Shared Music, Shared Pictures, Shared Videos and Software,” one user explained on the thread. My Book Live devices are the only devices currently affected by the malware attack. The units were sold from 2010-2014 and last received a firmware update in 2015, but many people still have data stored on them.
