Do you have a WD My Book Live or My Book Live Duo data backup device?

"Western Digital has determined that some My Book Live devices have been compromised by malicious software. In some cases, this breach has resulted in a factory reset that appears to have erased all data on the device," Western Digital stated in a support article.

The last firmware update for these external backup drives was in 2015. However, it appears that another firmware update may be in the works to address a vulnerability that allows malicious software to wreak havoc on people's data backups. In the meantime, however, Western Digital has stated that these drives should not be connected to the Web. [At this time, we recommend disconnecting My Book Live from the Internet to protect the data on the device. We are actively investigating the issue and will update this thread as soon as an update becomes available," Western Digital added.

The issue came to light when an affected owner posted a story of data loss on Western Digital's support forum (via BleepingComputer). The user said that he had used his My Book Live for years without any problems, but woke up to find that "all the data on it was gone today. [Other users have had similar experiences.

"All my data is gone too, the GUI message says it was 'factory reset' today! 06/23. I'm completely screwed without that data... . for years," another user wrote.

To make matters worse, several users report that they cannot even log into their My Book Live device. When they try to log in, they get a message that they have entered an "invalid password," even when using the default login information. This may be avoided by performing a factory reset again, but lost data cannot be recovered.

There is not much Western Digital can do for My Book Live owners who have lost their data. Those who do can, depending on the importance of the data, take the drive out, connect it to a PC (iFixIt has a handy guide to dismantling My Book Live), and try running a data recovery program on the disk. Similarly, you can pay a professional data recovery service to attempt to recover your files, although this tends to be expensive.

This situation underscores the importance of keeping multiple backups of mission-critical or valuable data. For the really important ones, also consider putting one of your backups in a different physical location in case of a physical disaster such as a fire or flood.