Garmin still down, struggles to fight back ransomware attack

Following reports of a ransomware attack on fitness wearable and smartwatch company Garmin, the company has published a notice on its official website, apologizing to customers for the inconvenience.

The company released a statement saying, “Garmin is currently experiencing an outage that affects Garmin services including Garmin Connect. As a result of the outage, some features and services across these platforms are unavailable to customers. Additionally, our product support call centres are affected by the outage and as a result, we are currently unable to receive any calls, emails, or online chats. We are working to restore our systems as quickly as possible and apologize for the inconvenience. Additional updates will be provided as they become available.”

Garmin has reassured customers by underlining the fact that Garmin Connect user data has not been lost due to the attack and will reappear on the device once the user has synced it. Though Garmin Connect is not accessible currently due the outage, activity and health and wellness data collected from Garmin devices will be back once the issue has been resolved. The company has also stated that it is yet to receive any indication that user data, including activity, payment or other personal information, has been affected by the outage.

After fresh customers showed concern in pairing of their new Garmin devices to Garmin Connect, the company responded by providing a link to find the status of Garmin Connect and soothed consumer minds by stating technicians were working as quickly as possible to get Connect back up and running.

Garmin has also said that inReach SOS and messaging were not impacted by the outage and remain fully functional, including the MapShare website and email reply page.

It has come to light that Maksim Viktorovich Yakubets, a 33-year-old Russian hacker is believed to be the head of Russian hacking group Evil Corp and responsible for the attack on Garmin's systems.

Operating online under the “Aqua”, Yakubets and his associates are reportedly demanding a ransom of $10 million from Garmin in exchange for allowing them to resume their operations. However, if Garmin were to comply and pay the ransom, it could potentially be found to be breaking United States sanctions. This is due to the fact that in December 2019, the U.S. Treasury Department sanctioned Evil Corp after causing more than $100 million in financial damages in the American banking system. The FBI has placed a $5 million reward on Yakubets’ head for information that leads to his capture.

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