QNAP has released a critical update for a number of its systems here.  The discovery was made by an Australian IT professional named Wayne Small.  Small runs the website SBSFaq which is a resource for small and medium business IT professionals.

His concerns were first mentioned in a post on his website on 17th July where he was initially critical of QNAP for not addressing the issue which he believed was so apparent.

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What is the issue?

In Small’s own words:

‘In short, if you have any QNAP running a version before 4.3.3.0154 20170413 or 4.2.5 20170413 then upgrade it immediately as you risk data loss should you have a drive in your RAID5/6 array fail.  No amount of data scrubbing will recover the data if you have a disk failure and have not upgraded to these versions at a minimum.’

The problem occurred when a disk had failed as when the disk was replaced the rebuild process kicked in  and corrupted some of the data through faulty calculations.  The problem was actually noticed by StorageCraft’s Image protect that Small used to backup the data and had failed some integrity checks.

QNAP have since released a critical technical advisory and as described by SBSFaq here are working hard to address the issue.