Western Digital confirms cyber attack, My Cloud Home outage

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Details are still scarce, but company confirms some WD data was taken

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A day after news broke concerning a cyberattack on storage giant Western Digital, the company has come forward with more details, including confirmation that the attackers stole some data from its systems.

“Based on the investigation to date, the Company believes the unauthorized party obtained certain data from its systems and is working to understand the nature and scope of that data,” a press release from the SSD and storage giant said. 

At the moment it’s unknown if the stolen data belongs to WD’s customers, employees, or someone else entirely. It's also not known exactly what type of data was stolen, and whether or not it can be used for identity theft. 

Continuous disruption

The company did confirm that the incident “may continue to cause disruption” to parts of its business operations - a possible symptom of a ransomware attack. 

It also said it was “implementing proactive measures” to secure its business, including taking systems and services offline. 

As we previously reported, the login service for WD My Cloud Home has been unavailable since last weekend, and although the company did not confirm these two events are related, it’s safe to speculate they are.

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As of Tuesday morning, the issue still seems unresolved, as Twitter users are still claiming not having access to their data. “@westerndigital how do we access data. There are important files in the system and am at a loss and not able to work for the past two days. When this will be set right,” one user asks. 

WD’s My Cloud status page shows the service as offline, with the following notification: “We are currently experiencing a service interruption that is preventing customers from accessing the My Cloud, My Cloud Home, My Cloud Home Duo, My Cloud OS 5, SanDisk ibi, SanDisk Ixpand Wireless Charger service. Our team is working urgently to resolve the issue and restore access as soon as possible. We apologize for any inconvenience this may cause and appreciate your patience.” 

TechRadar Pro has contacted WD for further comment.

Sead Fadilpašić

Sead is a seasoned freelance journalist based in Sarajevo, Bosnia and Herzegovina. He writes about IT (cloud, IoT, 5G, VPN) and cybersecurity (ransomware, data breaches, laws and regulations). In his career, spanning more than a decade, he’s written for numerous media outlets, including Al Jazeera Balkans. He’s also held several modules on content writing for Represent Communications.