If you have this popular external hard drive, your files may be at risk. What to do

Users of some Western Digital external hard drive devices are losing their files due to unexplained system compromises.

Western Digital has addressed the concerns brought up by many of the My Book Live device users, including some who wrote in a community forum that they had lost years worth of data.

The company says the compromise was due to an “exploitation of a remote command execution vulnerability” but did not elaborate. It advises users to disconnect the My Book Live and My Book Live Duo devices from the internet to help protect their data.

“We understand that our customers’ data is very important,” Western Digital wrote Thursday. “We are actively investigating the issue and will provide an updated advisory when we have more information.”

My Book hard drives can be purchased at many national retailers, including Walmart, Best Buy, Office Depot and Amazon. The My Book Live devices received their last firmware update in 2015, the company said.

Some people wrote to Western Digital on Twitter that they lost their data of more than 10 years.

Problems on the My Book Live devices were outlined by users in a community forum Thursday. Owners of the devices said their hard drives performed factory resets for an unknown reason.

Forum users speculated that a “threat actor” found devices vulnerable for an attack to issue the factory resets, Bleeping Computer reported.

The person who created the thread on the community page said their hard drive worked fine for years but on Thursday all of their data was gone.

“I am totally screwed without that data…years of it,” another user said.

“This is kind of scary. Exact same issue, I was able to reset my password...but all my data is gone,” said another user on the forum.