Any computer savvy Wammers out there? Baffling issue with my NAS...

[MotherSky]

This is a bit of a long shot, but before going completely down the rabbit hole, can anyone help me with the bizarre issue that I'm having with my NAS (a QNAP TS-351) - a little while ago, large parts of my music collection suddenly disappeared - only up to "J" in the alphabetical listing, and often leaving the album visible from my streamer, but only showing three or four tracks, other albums disappeared completely..... if I log into the NAS itself, all the 'invisible' files are still there, but now have the file extension "flac.7z" which appears to be some kind of zip file - there is no obvious way to reverse this that I can find (I did try selecting a file and extracting it to current location, but this just produced a message saying 'operation failed') and I did not back up the NAS to another drive (I will be doing this in the future) - if anyone is able to give me any pointers, I would be extremely grateful - failing this, I will contact QNAP support, or just smash the thing up with a large hammer and buy everything on vinyl.... MH

 

[JTW]

This is a bit of a long shot, but before going completely down the rabbit hole, can anyone help me with the bizarre issue that I'm having with my NAS (a QNAP TS-351) - a little while ago, large parts of my music collection suddenly disappeared - only up to "J" in the alphabetical listing, and often leaving the album visible from my streamer, but only showing three or four tracks, other albums disappeared completely..... if I log into the NAS itself, all the 'invisible' files are still there, but now have the file extension "flac.7z" which appears to be some kind of zip file - there is no obvious way to reverse this that I can find (I did try selecting a file and extracting it to current location, but this just produced a message saying 'operation failed') and I did not back up the NAS to another drive (I will be doing this in the future) - if anyone is able to give me any pointers, I would be extremely grateful - failing this, I will contact QNAP support, or just smash the thing up with a large hammer and buy everything on vinyl.... MH

I googled FLAC.7Z Nas and the results were alarming, I think your system may have been attacked by ransomware.
Did you have a backup.
Here is one page that came up, I'm not technically competent enough to understand it all
https://www.bleepingcomputer.com/fo...crypting-with-extension-7z-read-metxt/page-32Good luck

 

[MotherSky]

I googled FLAC.7Z Nas and the results were alarming, I think your system may have been attacked by ransomware.
Did you have a backup.
Here is one page that came up, I'm not technically competent enough to understand it all
[URL]https://www.bleepingcomputer.c...crypting-with-extension-7z-read-metxt/page-32[/URL]
Good luck

f*ck - that does appear to fit the facts - no, I did not have a backup... I thought in my innocence that the built in data security of a NAS would be sufficient

 

[Lancslinn]

I found QNAP NAS incredibly complicated to operate via Poweramp db ripper. No problems with hijacking over 5 years Use though. What about your laptop, computers etc? Innuos is much easier and with a hard drive plugged in via usb is continually updated. Hope you get sorted.

 

[MotherSky]

I found QNAP NAS incredibly complicated to operate via Poweramp db ripper. No problems with hijacking over 5 years Use though. What about your laptop, computers etc? Innuos is much easier and with a hard drive plugged in via usb is continually updated. Hope you get sorted.

Thank you - Clearly the QNAP interface is aimed at users with far more sophisticated requirements than mere music storage - I would certainly have opted for a stripped down audiophile solution had anything been available that didn't replicate functions of equipment that I already own & am very happy with - worst case I have a few weeks of reripping to do, and I will definitely be backing everything up to a separate drive next time - you live and learn.... MH

 

[t1no]

Thank you - Clearly the QNAP interface is aimed at users with far more sophisticated requirements than mere music storage - I would certainly have opted for a stripped down audiophile solution had anything been available that didn't replicate functions of equipment that I already own & am very happy with - worst case I have a few weeks of reripping to do, and I will definitely be backing everything up to a separate drive next time - you live and learn.... MH

All may not be lost … https://www.qnap.com/en/how-to/faq/...o-when-found-nas-is-encrypting-my-files-by-7z

https://www.qnap.com/en/how-to/tuto...o-recover-qlocker-encrypted-files-on-qnap-nas

 

[MotherSky]

All may not be lost … https://www.qnap.com/en/how-to/faq/...o-when-found-nas-is-encrypting-my-files-by-7z

https://www.qnap.com/en/how-to/tuto...o-recover-qlocker-encrypted-files-on-qnap-nas

I'm not counting my chickens, but I shall try this today - I confess that I spent the evening drinking wine and listening to a lot of music at the other end of the alphabet rather than grasping the nettle....

 

[t1no]

I'm not counting my chickens, but I shall try this today

Good luck

 

[ozzric]

My freinds QNAP was also hacked the same way. The QNAP patch does work, but 99% so you may find the odd bit of text missing in your filenames but the music data should still be intact.
My QNAP NAS is invisible to the outside world, turned off all network functions except local port 80.

 

[Jules_S]

Before you worry about having been hacked, note that .7Z is the standard file extension for files that have been compressed by the 7-Zip archiving utility. 7-Zip is like an alternative to the more well-known Winzip and similar file compression utilities, and while it can make standard zip files it also has its own, more efficient, algorithm and creates these .7Z files. I use it all the time both at home and at work, it's pretty well-known and "safe" - https://www.7-zip.org

I'm not saying that your files have definitely NOT been corrupted or mangled but as a first-step you could try downloading and using 7-Zip to un-archive them. If that's all that has happened then it's a relatively straightforward solution. What I can't explain is how the files would have become compressed in the first place - have you recently installed any other software on your NAS or run any utilities, or software updates?

EDIT: you may find when trying to unarchive the files is that it asks for a password, which would be in-keeping with someone trying to extort money from you. Check all your computers attached on your local network with a reputable anti-malware software (BitDefender, McAfee, etc) - if you have been attacked then ransomware could enter that way and will quite happily attempt to encrypt files on any accessible network drives, including your NAS.

 

[MotherSky]

Thanks chaps for your help with this - at best this provides a cautionary tale.... I rather lazy mindedly assumed that the purpose of a NAS was data security, rather than avoiding "downtime" - my files could not be retrieved as my NAS had been rebooted since the infection, and I failed to make a secondary backup, so it's back to square one for about a third of my music collection - on the bright side, I have all the CDs logically filed in the loft, so all is not lost. It does make me wonder why anyone bothers with RAID etc - a high quality single drive units with several physically separate backups actually makes far more sense - computers/networking are pretty much diametrically opposed to my day job, and my lack of experience in this field has become painfully evident - I was clearly chatting at the back of the class rather than paying proper attention

 

[rdale]

Thanks chaps for your help with this - at best this provides a cautionary tale.... I rather lazy mindedly assumed that the purpose of a NAS was data security, rather than avoiding "downtime" - my files could not be retrieved as my NAS had been rebooted since the infection, and I failed to make a secondary backup, so it's back to square one for about a third of my music collection - on the bright side, I have all the CDs logically filed in the loft, so all is not lost. It does make me wonder why anyone bothers with RAID etc - a high quality single drive units with several physically separate backups actually makes far more sense - computers/networking are pretty much diametrically opposed to my day job, and my lack of experience in this field has become painfully evident - I was clearly chatting at the back of the class rather than paying proper attention

I use a Raspberry Pi connected to a large USB disk which is mounted via NFS on my LAN. The disk could be mounted via SMB just as well if you wanted the disk to be seen by Windows or Mac computers. I agree about RAID being an over complicated waste of time for music collections smaller than the size of a single disk, or 8gb or so as you can make backups by copying the whole disk to another one as you say.

 

[MotherSky]

I use a Raspberry Pi connected to a large USB disk which is mounted via NFS on my LAN. The disk could be mounted via SMB just as well if you wanted the disk to be seen by Windows or Mac computers. I agree about RAID being an over complicated waste of time for music collections smaller than the size of a single disk, or 8gb or so as you can make backups by copying the whole disk to another one as you say.

I think that for the acronym averse, solutions like Innuos make a lot of sense - I'm pretty sure no hacking organisation is ever going to find niche audiophile software worthy of their attention - if there were something similarly user friendly available that didn't replicate functions of my current setup, I'd be very tempted to invest

 

[rdale]

I think that for the acronym averse, solutions like Innuos make a lot of sense - I'm pretty sure no hacking organisation is ever going to find niche audiophile software worthy of their attention - if there were something similarly user friendly available that didn't replicate functions of my current setup, I'd be very tempted to invest

Sorry about the acronyms, but I’m pretty sure there must be a simple canned solution for cheap computers like Raspberry Pi’s that a non-technical person could set up. I’m not sure you need to spend a lot of money on something like an Innuos file server.

The QNAP NAS just seems to be a complete disaster if it connects to the internet outside your LAN in an insecure manner by default, when there is no need to do that for music tracks in nearly all cases.

 

[Billz]

If you search the QNAP forums there is plenty on this. Happened to me over a year ago and I had to reset my NAS and restore from a backup. It’s important that you disable the Admin user account and install the QNAP security apps. If you don’t have a backup you are probably f*cked, unless you want to pay the ransom. Unfortunately it is a fallacy to think that a NAS is a secure storage device.
You need to apply as much security to a NAS as you do any other piece of hardware that is connected to the internet. I recently read about a guy that lost a fortune by a data breach. They got into their system via a light bulb!

 

[Jules_S]

RAID (Redundant Array of Inexpensive Discs) comes in many "flavours" to suit different purposes, many of which do provide protection from data loss caused by a hardware failure. But nothing is going to provide protection from an external hack that simply accesses the data and deletes, corrupts or encrypts it.

I'd still recommend using multiple discs and RAID (1, 5, 6 or 10 depending on how many drives you have and how much data you ned to store) for redundancy. There's lots of information online about the different types, but in a domestic situation I suspect that a 2-drive setup is the most common, and therefore RAID 1 would be suitable. Avoid RAID 0 as this merely spreads your data across the available drives to improve read / write access times, so if any drive fails you lose all your data.

If you want to keep a backup copy that's as safe as can be from hacking, I would recommend getting a simple external USB drive that you can plug into your NAS most models have a USB socket for this purpose), run a backup and then physically disconnect it again once complete. I am not familiar with QNAP NAS as I use Synology, but I expect they have an installable backup app if it doesn't come with one already installed. That should let you do "differential" backups so once the first one is complete, it will automatically identify files that have been added or changed, and only backup those ones so it saves a lot of time. Unless the files have already been damaged prior to backup, you know you'll have a safe copy you can restore from.

 

[jamesrfisher]

I have a Synology NAS, I only have one bay and a separate USB drive for backups, it is attached once a week for the incremental backup. Works very well.

 

[MotherSky]

RAID (Redundant Array of Inexpensive Discs) comes in many "flavours" to suit different purposes, many of which do provide protection from data loss caused by a hardware failure. But nothing is going to provide protection from an external hack that simply accesses the data and deletes, corrupts or encrypts it.

I'd still recommend using multiple discs and RAID (1, 5, 6 or 10 depending on how many drives you have and how much data you ned to store) for redundancy. There's lots of information online about the different types, but in a domestic situation I suspect that a 2-drive setup is the most common, and therefore RAID 1 would be suitable. Avoid RAID 0 as this merely spreads your data across the available drives to improve read / write access times, so if any drive fails you lose all your data.

If you want to keep a backup copy that's as safe as can be from hacking, I would recommend getting a simple external USB drive that you can plug into your NAS most models have a USB socket for this purpose), run a backup and then physically disconnect it again once complete. I am not familiar with QNAP NAS as I use Synology, but I expect they have an installable backup app if it doesn't come with one already installed. That should let you do "differential" backups so once the first one is complete, it will automatically identify files that have been added or changed, and only backup those ones so it saves a lot of time. Unless the files have already been damaged prior to backup, you know you'll have a safe copy you can restore from.

I gather that Synology is the "Apple" of the NAS world - much more user friendly than QNAP - another thing I wish I'd known before I started. There is indeed a rolling backup function on my NAS, it is just the vast array of other (unnecessary) functions that I object to... if there were an easy way to strip out all the surplus crud from the OS, just leaving what I actually need, then I'd be perfectly happy to stick with this as a storage solution - as it is, I am tempted to investigate other options - I might even look into setting up a Pi based system if I can find a straightforward step by step guide out there in the ether - ready made solutions like RipNas etc seem disproportionately expensive, but I would be prepared to throw £500 or so at the problem if I can find the right advice - there must be plenty of other people out there who don't want to get a degree in computer science just to listen to their own music collection - MH

 

[Jules_S]

Oops! Posted in the wrong thread by mistake....

 

[Strider]

Just a complete shot in the dark here - the extension .7z is deffo 7zip but is it worth a shot just rebuilding the library in your streamer before doing anything to drastic. On one of my Buffalo NAS and on a Windows PC all the extensions on my icons were change to .txt (notepad) but they opened normally, totally weird!

Like @rdale I use a Pi but with the library on a WD NAS but it also shares a backup folder with a Buffalo NAS, if you add tracks to the WD or the Buffalo they back up vice/versa, everything sits behind a firewall and although I can upload files via ftp using my business VPN to the WD NAS there are two passwords needed to gain access. (sorry if this is too complicated.)
Once in a while I copy the whole library to an external USB HDD because to lose my huge music collection would be devastating.
good luck!