[$] An unpleasant surprise for My Book Live owners

Post Syndicated from original https://lwn.net/Articles/861235/rss

Embedded devices need regular software updates in order to even be
minimally safe on today’s internet. Products that have reached their “end
of life”, thus are no longer being updated, are essentially ticking time
bombs—it is only a matter of time before they are vulnerable to
attack. That situation played out in June for owners of Western
Digital (WD) My Book Live network-attached storage (NAS) devices; what was
meant to be a disk for home users
accessible via the internet turned into a black hole when a remote
command-execution flaw was used to delete all of the data stored there. Or
so it seemed at first.