News + Trends

Western Digital forces My Cloud users to update

20/6/2023

Translation: machine translated

Only those who have installed the latest firmware update for Western Digital NAS devices have been able to access their own data via My Cloud since 15 June. All others are excluded.

You currently have no access to the My Cloud on your Western Digital device? This is most likely due to the fact that you have not yet updated the firmware. Western Digital has chosen this unusually harsh measure to put pressure on users to install updates. Once the update is complete, everything should work again. Local access will still work.

On 15 June, the company began blocking web access if the NAS device had not yet been updated to firmware version 5.26.202 (My Cloud) or 9.4.1-101 (My Cloud Home, SanDisk ibi). Both updates had been released a month earlier, on 15 May. They contain fixes for several vulnerabilities, according to Western Digital.

My Cloud is a service that connects NAS devices to Western Digital's cloud service. This enables users to store, access, back up and share media from the internet. In April, a hacker attack on My Cloud resulted in users being exposed to ransomware attacks. Western Digital had to shut down its servers for over a week to fix this problem. The aforementioned update was later able to close this security gap. This allowed users to be exposed to threats such as ransomware attacks.