It's time to buy a new NAS.
  • shoulderoforion@fedia.io
    441·
    11 days ago

    I’m a little bit torn on this one, we’re talking 10-15 year old devices here. The number of companies that will continue to produce emergency security patches for their hardware so old and having reached EOL four years ago in 2020 are few and far between. Caveat Emptor most definitely, but if you’re someone who likes to keep their tech running forever, you’re going to need to get creative, when the manufacturer eventually stops patching. For this particular instance, I’d recommend placing the unit behind a vpn on the lan.

    • Benjaben@lemmy.world
      14·
      11 days ago

      Yeah, I mean…what IS “end of life” / “end of support” other than not patching newly found issues, after long enough? Not enough info in the article to indicate any kind of bait and switch or annoyingly short support window, and the support window didn’t end recently either. Seems pretty reasonable TBH.

      Then again it’s a lot of vulnerable devices, and doesn’t sound like too hard of a fix. But for all I know they’ve dismantled their tooling for testing patches on those devices, etc. Would be nice if they addressed it, but I can’t exactly condemn them for not.

      • 2pt_perversion@lemmy.world
        11·
        11 days ago

        It looks like they just didn’t neutralize/sanitize controllable input data so it should be a pretty easy fix. I think if a security researcher gives you a layup by identifying an easily fixable vulnerability a company should just take it, even if the product is old. If for no other reason than it’s bad marketing when news articles like this come out.

        • Benjaben@lemmy.world
          3·
          11 days ago

          Yeah, I know what you mean, and yep it looked like just input sanitization on a very specific thing. I don’t disagree, headlines being headlines, and even just broad benefit vs. overall level of effort seems pretty positive to me from an outsider’s perspective.

          But then again, issuing a firmware update is also an implicit guarantee that no (unrelated) functionality will degrade, which really needs a degree of testing in order to be a responsible business decision. And then on the optics side, I can see there being a benefit to a hard line in the sand regarding EOL, vs getting into the weeds of determining on a case by case basis what merits violating their own policy, and all the implications such granular judgment calls would entail (although they and all others probably must do something similar, to some degree).

          Idk, I don’t own much or any of their stuff these days, no real skin in the game, nor do I have any particularly relevant info or opinions on the company. Just rambling lol.

    • Fizz@lemmy.nz
      1·
      10 days ago

      These are storages though. They should last that long. Just by the fact there is still 60,000 in use is enough reason to patch it.

  • blackfire@lemmy.world
    11·
    11 days ago

    Just looked it up and the DNS-320 Version 1.00 is from 2010. I get it on the company side thats old and was a given to be out of date. People who own it should take more mitigations to protect against any unwanted connections. Or use something that doesn’t rely on proprietary firmwares like truenas or unraid.

    • ky56@aussie.zone
      9·
      10 days ago

      Banana Pi R3 or R64 (OpenWRT). Some DIY assembly required but it will probably last you over a decade.

      My favorite part about these is that they are unbrickable. There is no bootloader to permanently corrupt as the firmware that loads the flash chip is in mask memory and the firmware you load from OpenWRT is the bootloader + firmware. So even if the flash chip dies you can use the other flash chip on the board or with soldering skills replace it and re-flash it.

  • umbraroze@lemmy.world
    8·
    11 days ago

    Yup, doesn’t surprise me.

    I also have a NAS box that’s out of support. Turned off all of the nifty services and firewalled the shit out of it so it won’t be visible outside the LAN even by accident. Will replace it with a FreeBSD box as soon as I get a new hard drive.

    • SL3wvmnas@discuss.tchncs.de
      13·
      11 days ago

      Just YSK, vlan is not a security measure. It enumerates Ethernet packages with a number different than zero, and you can see all vlans if the network card decides it. So if some other device on your net is compromised, there is a chance traffic to your vulnerable box can be too. ( it gets a little more complicated with vlan aware switches in the middle. But not impossible)

      Edit: BTW I feel you I too have a bit of older hardware thats on their own net where I just hope nothing bad happens til I come around to replacing it…

  • corroded@lemmy.world
    212·
    11 days ago

    The article didn’t specify how old the affected models are, but any time you use an all-in-one device with proprietary software, you take the risk of this happening.

    To some extent, you can’t really blame the manufacturers for this, either. They can’t reasonably continue maintaining software for their products for an indefinite period of time. As an extreme example, I wouldn’t expect the old Linksys wifi router I used in 2004 to still be receiving firmware updates.

    My NAS hardware is relatively ancient, but it’s regular server hardware running TrueNAS. If TrueNAS suddenly stops getting updates, there’s UnRaid, or just Linux. It really goes to show the advantage of using generic hardware with open software.

      • m-p{3}@lemmy.ca
        10·
        11 days ago

        For those kind of devices, the manufacturer should be required to make it possible to easily load a third-party firmware when they declare a device as obsolete.

        I understand it’s not financially viable to support a device beyond a certain threshold, but there’s likely a community behind those that are willing to keep these devices alive for a while longer, with the benefit of reducing the amount of ewaste.

    • SplashJackson@lemmy.ca
      2·
      11 days ago

      I expect security patches for the tires on my Model T. Ford is still around, so what’s the ploblem?

    • ramble81@lemm.ee
      102·
      11 days ago

      you can’t really blame the manufacturers for this, either. They can’t reasonably continue maintaining software for their products for an indefinite period of time.

      Shh, anytime I say this about Windows I get people coming out of the woodwork that say Windows 7 should be supported 15 years later.

      • wizardbeard@lemmy.dbzer0.com
        42·
        11 days ago

        Don’t you know that it’s entirely unreasonable to expect your users to have hardware that’s a standard feature on any machine made in the last ten years, that can be added to existing systems for around $30 and a free card slot? /s

        I don’t think I’ll ever understand the insistence that a TPM module is a bridge too far.

        • Feyd@programming.dev
          3·
          11 days ago

          Because of the sheer amount of e-waste it will generate by force-decommissioning hardware in active usage. Don’t know why that’s so hard to understand.

          • wizardbeard@lemmy.dbzer0.com
            1·
            10 days ago

            The only reason that’s any different than any other time Microsoft has released a new OS is that more people own computers now than ever before, improvements in hardware power have slowed significantly, and people are more outspoken online now.

            It’s still not reasonable to expect them to support all hardware forever on an aging codebase.

            I understand the frustration, but this isn’t some new thing for this new OS in particular.

            • Feyd@programming.dev
              1·
              10 days ago

              You’re extrapolating to “forever”. I just want to reduce e-waste by not forcing people to get new computers they don’t want or need yet. Every year of additional service life, more people upgrade hardware for other reasons.

    • lemmyng@lemmy.ca
      7·
      11 days ago

      Doesn’t matter to the D-Link bean counters. Either case is a non-sale to them. Never mind that they tank whatever is left of their already terrible reputation, all they care about is immediate shareholder revenue generation, and spending money maintaining software for older hardware is a loss to them.

    • Captain Aggravated@sh.itjust.works
      10·
      11 days ago

      I’ll allow it (my authority: some jerk that doesn’t even have an account on this instance).

      Part of Reddit culture was hyper narrow focus on the topics of subreddits. I wouldn’t be surprised if the mods of r/samsung_galaxy removed “Overall I like my Pixel better” for being off-topic, even if it was a reply in the comment chain “I have both a Pixel 5 and an S22 and the S22 has the better camera.” “Other than the camera which of the two phones do you like best?” 7 day ban, rule 4: mentions another brand of phone without also mentioning a Samsung.

      That doesn’t happen here on Lemmy as much and I don’t mind it. While a NAS isn’t necessarily directly a piece of gaming hardware, I think a lot of gamers might have one. Any who stream might save video of their play sessions to a NAS, etc. So I think this article is of peripheral interest to PC gamers.

  • ours@lemmy.world
    75·
    11 days ago

    Meanwhile Synology keeps updating my ageing NAS.

    They may not have the best bang for the buck for hardware but their software package is really well put together.