My NAS: Gone in 60 seconds

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Created: Tuesday, 03 August 2021

Written by Tim Nicholls

Gone in 60 seconds! Not a film but my NAS at home! Two terabytes of music and photographs. Recently a hacker was able to send a factory reset command out to owners of Western Digital network attached storage devices, and my home NAS was one of the affected. Despite having firewall protections in place they were able to use a zero-day exploit to reset thousands of devices worldwide. Fortunately, I keep multiple backups of my data, so it was an inconvenience rather than a tragedy.

Every day we hear about new malware or fresh ransomware attacks or newly-disclosed zero-day exploits (think PrintNightmare). And some of these attacks succeed even against targets that are highly defended such as government departments, police forces, public institutions and major corporations. Therefore part of any company's diligent planning should not only be about having the best defenses possible, but how to respond to, and recover from a successful attack.

For instance simply trying to clean up an infected Server or PC may take a very long time and it can be difficult to guarantee that it is really clean. Wiping and re-imaging is more reliable, and frequently faster.

Ensuring data is backed up offsite, away from the influence of encrypting ransomware will allow a business to restore their operations quickly in the event of a successful attack.