Western Digital disclosed a data breach that was identified on March 26. The company stated that its network was breached by an unauthorised third party that was able to access multiple company systems. The attack has caused and “may continue to cause disruption to parts of the company’s business operation”.
The press release stated that WD is taking action to secure its business operations. For now, the company has implemented incidence response efforts, beefed up security and started an investigation with the help of external security and forensic experts.
It’s also coordinating with law enforcement agencies. The investigation is still in its early stages, with the company working to understand the “nature and scope” of the data accessed. While there’s no information on the attack vector or whether or not any company or customer data was accessed, WD’s statement does hint towards a ransomware attack, which could be a big problem for a company that’s primarily known for making storage devices.
However, this has left several client-facing services from WD unavailable, and users aren’t happy about that. While remediation efforts are ongoing and the company is working to get affected infrastructure back up and running, at the time of writing, the My Cloud, My Cloud Home, My Cloud Home Duo, My Cloud OS5, SanDisk ibi and SanDisk Ixpand Wireless Charge services are down. The next update is expected to arrive on April 3, but there’s no word from WD yet.
The attack has left a sour taste with WD customers, with many taking to social media to complain about not being able to access the data on their storage devices. The service currently shows a “503 Service Temporarily Unavailable” error if accessed. It’s been over 24 hours since the outage was first reported but cloud, proxy, web authentication, emails and push notifications are still unavailable.
In the News: Twitter starts axing verified checkmarks from accounts that refuse to pay
