Home > News

Western Digital Confirms Customer Data Stolen in Hack

By Charlie Fripp
Western Digital Hard Drive

Everybody can fall victim to a cyberattack, but unfortunately, when it involves a large corporation, there is always a real chance that your data has been compromised. If you have an account with hard drive manufacturer and online storage provider Western Digital, you must change your passwords immediately, as your data may have been stolen in a hack.

Tip: learn how to fix the “External Hard Drive Access Denied” error in Windows.

The Fallout From Earlier Hack

Back in March of this year, Western Digital realized that it was the victim of a cyberattack, with criminals gaining unauthorized access to some of its online systems. However, it wasn’t until a week later that it made the news public. It also put several measures in place to stop data from leaking and launched an investigation.

Western Digital Hard Drive
Image source: Unsplash

It’s now been over a month, and it seems that the consequences of the Western Digital data breach were more severe than initially thought. The company brought its My Cloud service back online on April 13, but account access to Western Digital’s online store won’t be accessible until later this month.

The hackers made off with a treasure trove of information that included customers’ personal data. A statement on its website explains that the criminals “obtained a copy of a Western Digital database used for our online store that contained some personal information of our online store customers.”

This information includes:

  • Customer names
  • Billing and shipping addresses
  • Email addresses
  • Telephone numbers

To make matters worse, it also includes partial credit card numbers and passwords. The latter of which Western Digital says was “in an encrypted format, hashed and salted.” This is an industry technique to make it harder to decipher the information.

Wd Black Hdd
Image source: Unsplash

As with any hack, there is the possibility that the data can make its way to the dark Web, where other hackers have been known to buy and sell leaked credentials. Western Digital is aware of this and is “investigating the validity of this data” and will take action if necessary.

If you have a Western Digital account and haven’t done so already, you must change your username and password immediately to protect yourself against the data hack. Keep an eye on your banking statements for any unauthorized transactions and take appropriate steps to prevent identity fraud.

Tip: is your hard drive running slow? Learn how to defrag your Windows hard drive so that the data is organized better.

Image credit: Unsplash

Subscribe to our newsletter!

Our latest tutorials delivered straight to your inbox

Charlie Fripp Avatar
Charlie Fripp
Charlie Fripp is a technology writer with a strong focus on consumer gadgets, video games, and cyber security. He holds an undergraduate degree in professional journalism and has worked as a journalist for over 15 years. In his spare time, he enjoys playing various musical instruments and gardening.

Read next

Octopuses possess roughly 500 million neurons distributed across their body, with two-thirds located in their arms rather than their central brain, meaning each arm can taste, problem-solve, and react to stimuli independently of whatever the octopus is otherwise paying attention to.
Explore the historic Roman bridge in lush Salamanca, Spain captured beautifully in daylight.
The Roman aqueduct at Segovia, built around the first century AD without mortar, still carried water into the 1970s, its 167 granite arches held together by nothing but the precise weight distribution of stones cut to fit each other within fractions of a millimeter.
When the SS Great Eastern laid the first working transatlantic telegraph cable in 1866, a message that had taken ten days by steamship suddenly crossed the ocean in minutes, and the financial markets of London and New York were forced, within a single trading week, to invent the modern concept of synchronised global price.
From below of blue starry sky over radio telescope and trees with leaves
The Big Ear telescope was scanning at 1420.4056 megahertz on the night of 15 August 1977, the exact frequency at which hydrogen atoms vibrate across the universe, because Giuseppe Cocconi and Philip Morrison had argued years earlier that any species trying to be found would broadcast on that channel — and then, for 72 seconds, something did.
In 2016, archaeologists dated two rings of snapped stalagmites in France’s Bruniquel Cave to 176,500 years ago, evidence that Neanderthals had walked 336 metres into darkness with fire and built architecture deep underground long before modern humans reached Europe
Otto von Bismarck was 74 when Germany adopted the world’s first national old-age social insurance program in 1889, setting the pension age at 70 after years of fighting socialists with bans, laws, and a promise few workers would live long enough to use
When cosmonaut Valeri Polyakov stepped out of his Soyuz capsule in March 1995 after 437 consecutive days aboard Mir, doctors recorded him at several centimetres above his pre-flight height, and his spine had become so unaccustomed to gravity that the recovery team carried him to a chair rather than risk the compression of letting him walk.
When Bell Labs engineer Karl Jansky pointed a rotating antenna at the sky in 1932 looking for sources of transatlantic radio static, he kept picking up a faint hiss that peaked every 23 hours and 56 minutes, and he eventually realized he had become the first human to hear the center of the Milky Way.