Garmin services shutdown after crippling ransomware attack
- by Joann Nelson
- in Sci-tech
- — Jul 27, 2020
Users have been unable to sync their data with Garmin's services, with some expressing concern on social media about the safety of their health data that was uploaded to the Taiwanese company.
Yesterday, Garmin said that its services and call centers were down because of an outage, however, Garmin employees shared a different version of what actually happened.
Garmin has assured people that there is "no sign" that own information was stolen for the duration of the company's main, ongoing outage. "Garmin are working to resolve this issue as quickly as possible and apologise for the inconvenience".
And pilots who use flyGarmin can not now download up-to-date aviation databases, which is a legal requirement.
Garmin has shut down various services after it was affected by an outage that was reportedly caused by a ransomware attack, ZDNet reports. However, in addition to its wearable devices being sidelined, Garmin's flyGarmin web service is also down. flyGarmin is navigational software used by some pilots.
Garmin stated that the same attack critically impacted its call centers, and therefore the company is unable to answer customer queries through the phone, email, or online chat.
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No, it's not just you.
Garmin has yet to officially call it a ransomware attack, but Garmin employees have individually referred to it as such and even stated it's a new strain of ransomware called WastedLocker.
The unexpected maintenance lasted for 12 hours in Japan and India, and the website and other services are back online now. But Garmin hasn't publicly confirmed any such attack.
As of now, it isn't clear whether users should be anxious about their personal data.
"The security incident at Garmin highlights the need for organizations to implement a well thought out and formalized Incident Response plan with a preselected response team for key tasks like recovery, root cause analysis, and public communications". According to Talos Intelligence, after initially compromising corporate networks, the attacker behind WastedLocker performs privilege escalation and lateral movement prior to activating ransomware and demanding ransom payment. While couch potatoes may laugh - after all, Garmin will likely get things up and running again eventually - the pain is real for those who keep themselves motivated via self-quantification.
