Re: Security News This Week: Hackers Are Erasing Western Digital Hard Drives Remotely

Mayayana <[email protected]> wrote:
> "Frank Slootweg" <[email protected]> wrote
> 
> | >   The problem is with "My Book Live", an idiotic and unsafe
> | > "personal cloud" device designed to be accessed from
> | > online. So as with remote desktop, the real problem is with
> | > people thinking it's safe to allow direct access to their
> | > computers from the Internet.
> |
> |  It's not 'idiotic' and it's not 'unsafe'
> 
>   There are some things that can't be made entirely safe. One
> is javascript in browsers. Another is setting up your system
> for remote access. There are reeasons to risk both. There's
> no sensible reason to risk it in order to have a "private cloud".
> Thus, idiotic.

  I think you don't quite know what a "personal cloud" is and is not.

  You seem to say that "There are reasons to risk" "setting up your
system for remote access". If so, guess what? The "personal cloud" is
also a system which you set up for remote access. It's just not - at
least not mainly - a *computational* system, big deal. The "personal
cloud" is just a way to access one's files from the Internet, just like
"setting up your system for remote access" is, no more, no less.

  I think that the mere mention of "cloud" gets your knickers in a
twist. Lighten up! It's just a buzz word. We already did "cloud" four
decades ago, only it was called Remote File Access (RFA), Network File
System (NFS), etc.. (See also the - snipped - analogies in my earlier
post.)

> |  Also note that the reports are about people 'losing all their data'!
> | How is that possible? Did they only have *one* copy of their data?
> 
>   Maybe so, maybe not. That wasn't the point. The point was that
> their disks were erased. Rather shocking, don't you think, backup
> or not? You can pretend there's no risk to what
> you're doing but it just isn't true.

  I'm not doing anything (see the part you snipped), but it's just a
case of misconfigured system gets compromised. No news at eleven.

  FYI, (before my previous post), I checked the configuration of my
(Synology DS115j) NAS which has "personal cloud" functionality. Guess
what? The default is that that functionality is completely disabled.

  Bottom line: If you would be "setting up your system for remote
access" without proper security (i.e. authentication, etc.) and someone
would access your system and erase your disk(s), would that also be all
over the news and people blaming Microsoft or/and whoever made your
computer, disk, <whatever>!? I don't think so.