Month: June 2021

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Update 6/29/2021, 9:00 PM: Western Digital has published an update that says the company will provide data recovery services starting early next month. My Book Live customers will also be eligible for a trade-in program so they can upgrade to My Cloud devices. A spokeswoman said the data recovery service will be free of charge.

The company also provided new technical details about the zeroday, which is now being tracked as CVE-2021-35941. Company officials wrote:

We have heard concerns about the nature of this vulnerability and are sharing technical details to address these questions. We have determined that the unauthenticated factory reset vulnerability was introduced to the My Book Live in April of 2011 as part of a refactor of authentication logic in the device firmware. The refactor centralized the authentication logic into a single file, which is present on the device as includes/component_config.php and contains the authentication type required by each endpoint. In this refactor, the authentication logic in system_factory_restore.php was correctly disabled, but the appropriate authentication type of ADMIN_AUTH_LAN_ALL was not added to component_config.php, resulting in the vulnerability. The same refactor removed authentication logic from other files and correctly added the appropriate authentication type to the component_config.php file.

The post added:

The successful gravitational-wave detections just keep coming for the LIGO-Virgo-KAGRA collaboration, which has now confirmed two separate "mixed" mergers between black holes and neutron stars, sending powerful gravitational waves rippling across spacetime. Those signals were detected last year by the collaboration, just 10 days apart. A year and a half later, the events officially constitute the first confirmed detection of mixed mergers, as described in a new paper published in The Astrophysical Journal Letters.

"With this new discovery of neutron star-black hole mergers outside our galaxy, we have found the missing type of binary," said co-author Astrid Lamberts of CNRS, a researcher on the Virgo collaboration in Nice. "We can finally begin to understand how many of these systems exist, how often they merge, and why we have not yet seen examples in the Milky Way."

LIGO detects gravitational waves via laser interferometry, using high-powered lasers to measure tiny changes in the distance between two objects positioned kilometers apart. LIGO has detectors in Hanford, Washington state, and in Livingston, Louisiana. A third detector in Italy, Advanced VIRGO, came online in 2016. In Japan, KAGRA is now online, and it's the first gravitational-wave detector in Asia and the first to be built underground. Construction began on LIGO-India earlier this year, and physicists expect it will turn on sometime after 2025.