Customers still can't access My Cloud data after Western Digital hack fallout

Breach at Western Digital

On April 3, Western Digital disclosed that it had a security incident on March 26. It is still unknown who was responsible for the breach or if it was a ransomware attack.

However, some of Western Digital's data was stolen in the incident. The company is trying to determine how much data was affected and if it included information from customers.

Western Digital took the systems and services offline as a precautionary measure. The Western Digital-induced outage for the company's My Cloud services started on April 3, and the platform is still down.

As a result, users cannot access My Cloud, My Cloud Home, My Cloud Home Duo, My Cloud OS 5, SanDisk ibi, and the SanDisk Ixpand Wireless Charger service.

"As part of its remediation efforts, Western Digital is actively working to restore impacted infrastructure and services," it reported. "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."

Ira Winkler, Field CISO and Vice President at CYE speculated that it might involve intellectual property theft.

"IP theft is unfortunately common in this industry, and Western Digital is a leader in the field and has a lot of data attractive to competitors," he told SDxCentral. "It is possible that they have some information about clients, such as warranty registration related information, and some personal information on their employees."

The investigation is ongoing, and Western Digital is working with security and forensic experts.

Backing up data

If Western Digital customers haven't already, they should ensure their data is backed up to multiple cloud services and offline hard drives, though that might not be possible at the moment if My Cloud is down.

A common refrain for data backups is known as the "rule of 3" or "3-2-1" strategy. It means having at least three copies of your data, two in one location and one at another site.

For example, Mac users can use Time Machine to back up their computers and store the data on external hard drives. Then, according to the 3-2-1 strategy, one or two of those hard drives can stay at home while one can be stored at a friend or family member's house.

People can also store their data on a cloud service like Apple's iCloud, Backblaze, or others. These two companies encrypt user data stored on their servers, making them an ideal choice to stay safe from data breaches.