I think the issue here is "end of life" is defined way too soon for portable hard drives. The mechanical parts have a 4% annual failure rate, or a half-life of 12.5 years. The software should be supported for that long.
The drives themselves and their function as a NAS on a LAN is still fine.
When "Live" EOLed, they should have turned off the servers and disabled the function. If they weren't going to service/support it anymore, then they should have been honest about it.
Of course, their consumers would have screamed, so they did the worst possible thing, kept the service running as-is and didn't make it clear that people were leaving themselves open to attack.
That makes me think of the internet radio owners (Grace Digital, Yamaha, etc.) that all had their products brick because the underlying look-up service just up and went away. No problem. You just have to buy another hunk of plastic and microprocessor.
(Also, my hard drives always fail after I put them in the bathtub. Lol.)
E.g.: Mybook Live Duo 8TB: https://productimages.hepsiburada.net/s/12/500/8922723713074...
Typical business life of a computer is 5 years. Typical service/support agreement is 1-3 years.
Try getting Apple to address a failed hard drive that's 12 years old. They'd laugh in your face.
The current fault erases everything on the drive. That can be equated fairly equally with mechanical failure. Let's imagine a different bug for instance, that allows anyone on the internet to read/write all the data on the drive. If one of these bugs emerged after 12 years, then there is a much stronger argument that the manufacturer should fix it, because it is a fundamental fault with the device.
Under the sale of goods act of 1979, the device must be suitable for the purpose for which it was sold, and there is no time limit on that, so any consumer with the device could demand that the person who sold it to them fix it. The device was unsuitable for the purpose for which it was sold from day one - it just took 12 years to find that out.
They issue security updates for their current OS and 2 versions before, AFAIK.
WD sells the hardware, hard drive, and software as one sealed unit. The part that fails first will be the hard drive inside. The unit shouldn't be end-of-life until it actually should be expected to fail. (WD claims the units were end of life in 2016)
e.g.: Live Duo 8TB: https://productimages.hepsiburada.net/s/12/500/8922723713074...