More and more commonly we have pieces for tech that work perfectly well but fall by the wayside as support for them is dropped. I have such a device in the house – an HP MyCloud Drive – which is a storage device that is accessible from any computer or phone on my home network but also available from outside the house like “traditional” cloud storage.
The problem is however that once the security updates stop with these always on devices that they potentially leave a cyber-door open to every phone, computer, Smart TV, web cam, video doorbell (you get the idea) in the house.
But the drive works perfectly well, so I don’t want to scrap it. Time to isolate it from the internet!
I’ve done that in 2 steps – stop the internet seeing the device and stop the device seeing the internet
1) Stop the internet seeing the drive
A bit more tricky, and possibly may depend on how flexible the settings of your ISP router are – some tie done the settings more than others. I can only reference my setup (this isn’t an inexhaustible guide).
After logging in to the router as an administrator it’s time to head over to the security and firewall section. This sets up the rules for what network traffic is allowed in and out of the house. I set up a 2 rules in the firewall blocking all traffic from the internet\WAN to the network address of the drive and vice versa.
2) Stop the drive seeing the internet (belt & braces)
This is just an extra way of stopping the drive seeing the internet. In the network settings (of all networked items) there is a setting called “Default Gateway” or sometime just “Gateway”. When a device is trying to communicate with a network address it first checks it’s local network and if not found heads to the default gateway (usually your router). Removing the address for the default gateway will stop it looking elsewhere and thus seeing the internet.
All done, and now I have flexible storage space for the house that’s cut off from the internet.
Final Note: it’s work pointing out that if one of the other devices (computer, phone, Smart TV) on the network is compromised then the drive will be accessible using that as an access point to route through. So be sure to keep those security patches up to date. One of the perils of the “internet of things”!