For more than a day, users of Western Digital’s My Cloud cloud storage system have not had remote access to their data. The website where you traditionally have to enter your username and password to access your files shows only an error message saying that it is “temporarily unavailable.”
An attack on the company’s servers at the end of March is behind the drop in service and the truth is that the company still does not know when it will be able to be operational again. “From what we have discovered so far, the attacker obtained certain data from our systems and we are working with security forces to understand the scope and discover those responsible,” they explained in a statement.
My Cloud is a service similar to other cloud storage systems such as Dropbox or Google Drive, but associated with a range of external hard drives and network-attached storage (NAS) servers from the company.
The data stored on these drives can be consulted from the local network, but it is also accessible remotely, for example from a telephone or a computer when you are traveling, through a web interface. The units can also back up all data to an external server if users configure it.
These two functions are the ones that are currently blocked, a decision that the company has taken proactively for fear that the data obtained by the attacker will allow access to the information that the different clients have in the service.
Although Western Digital has not specified the nature of the attack, Brett Callow, a security analyst at the security company Emsisoft, believes that it could be ransomware, a type of attack in which the content on the servers of the attacked company is encrypted ( and therefore inaccessible) until a “ransom” is paid in exchange for the key that allows decryption.
According to the criteria of The Trust Project