Intel486dx33 wrote on 2020-04-15, 15:21:Could a hacker have caused these drives to fail ?
Some malicious code that could destroy NAS drives ?
I don't think that hackers did that, but I know at least two methods of killing hard disks: using SATA security features and using power save features.
Unsing the SATA features, you could try to set the HPA feature to cover (almost) the entire disk. The disk won't be physically damaged but would be unusable. Also, there are SATA commands to set passwords, lock disks and secure erase.
About power saving... well I know of some devices that their firmware (if not upgraded) slowly killed disks. They use an embedded Linux that made the disks go into power save mode as quick as possible. On the other hand, it wrote some data to their logs frequently (not so frequent that avoided the HDD sleeping, but enough to awake it quickly). So the HDD was constantly doing load-unload cycles, to the point that the disks failed after a time. I've seen some disks that SMART reported more than 1.8 million load-unload cycles... and the manufacturer webs stated that they guaranteed about 600k. Note that this behaviour won't kill your disks inmediatly, but you'll have a physical failure over time (it usually takes more than a year on that devices to kill a disk).
I guess that (if a hacker can write to the OS files) it could replicate the second method, or use the first one to make most people throw their disks away. In any case, if I were a hacker and wanted to kill your data, I'd use the typical dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/sda command. It's easier and faster.
I have traveled across the universe and through the years to find Her.
Sometimes going all the way is just a start...
I'm selling some stuff!