Garmin subjected to ongoing cyber attack, some service resumes

Garmin is now in to its fourth day managing a cyber attack that has reportedly seen it asked for a $10 million ransom by hackers.

Some services are now beginning to return, albeit not at full capacity and not before the firm’s troubles caught the attention of much of the mainstream media. The outage of services are not limited to cycle market products, with the firm’s services used by aircraft pilots among other segments affected.

Online service tools still appear to have vulnerability, though the Connect service on which the firm relies to synchronise activity is now beginning to return. This has led to some activity once more beginning to sync with run and cycle software Strava. Further delays of uploads are expected as a backlog of data works its way through the system.

The GPS giant has reassured its customers that no data, training activity, payment, nor other personal customer details have been obtained as part of the hack, allegedly attributed to WastedLocker ransomware.

At the time of writing, the firm’s services, including contact with its customer support teams remain largely offline as a result of the cyber attack. A company-wide shutdown of devices to prevent the possibility of encryption by attackers has reportedly been put into place; thus causing the shut down of the connected services.

The business first reported the outage of its services on July 23rd, writing “We are currently experiencing an outage that affects Garmin Connect, and as a result, the Garmin Connect website and mobile app are down at this time. This outage also affects our call centers, and we are currently unable to receive any calls, emails or online chats. We are working to resolve this issue as quickly as possible and apologize for this inconvenience.”

Reports suggest that the attack began in Taiwan, though a Russian cybercriminal group known as Evil Corp is believed to be behind the ransomware’s deployment against Garmin.

The hacker group has previously been sanctioned by the U.S. Treasury Department for its role in delivering $100 million in financial damages late in 2019. As a result of this, Garmin would find itself in an awkward position if it did decide the best route forward was to pay up.

Updates and FAQs on the outage can be seen here.