Malware sticks to QNAP hardware may require hard reset

Manufacturer of highly praised NAS solutions QNAP is under the attack of malware that specifically targets their hardware. Named QSnatch, is told to require a hard reset to be removed from the company’s NAS products or a simple update.

A malware targets QNAP hardware

From your connected living room to enterprise datacentres QNAP known for its reliable network storage products. Their NAS software QTS is arguably one of the most comprehensive NAS-specific operating systems out there and provides many great features with any QNAP product for professionals as well as home users.

A malware named QSnatch which targets QNAP hardware and software has been detected. QSnatch targets QNAP systems and stays on the device if it is not removed. The company tells that currently only way to remove this threat is to hard reset the device, which would mean terabytes of data moving and then reinstallation and reconfiguration of the whole hardware and transferring it back to the storage in most cases.

This procedure would require excruciatingly painful wait times for data backup and restoration and means a huge downtime for any institution that relies on QNAP NAS for main data storage. In this kind of a scenario, data backup and restoration would also require a kind of medium to store data safely in the process.

Updating software to remove QSnatch

The company previously stated that the only way to remove was to perform a hard reset but they are recently released a software update to mitigate the threat. The company also released a security advisory regarding this malware, that list the affected QTS versions. Advisory suggests updating the QTS and other software on devices immediately as further developments are underway that prevent the further effects of the malicious software.

It is advised by security experts that users update their QTS versions but also may require to do a hard reset if malware is already present on the system. There is contradicting news that update allows users to get clean of the malware without a hard reset but QNAP states in their security advisory that in the listed firmware releases removes the already present malware from the system.

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