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Garmin finally confirms it was hit by ransomware

Last week Garmin experienced what it called an “outage” of its services which included Garmin Connect and flyGarmin among many others.

Shortly after the “outage” was acknowledged reports began to circulate that Garmin had been hit by ransomware.

Ransomware is a particularly dastardly piece of malware that encrypts your files and demands you pay a ransom for the decryption key.

For private users this might be a minor inconvenience, but for a company it can spell disaster and we’re seeing that right now as Garmin approaches the seventh day of trying to get things back in order.

“Garmin Ltd. was the victim of a cyber attack that encrypted some of our systems on July 23, 2020. As a result, many of our online services were interrupted including website functions, customer support, customer facing applications, and company communications. We immediately began to assess the nature of the attack and started remediation,” Garmin said in an update on its website.

The “good” news is that Garmin has no reason to believe customer data including payment information from Garmin Pay was accessed lost or stolen.

Since the news broke last week several reports have pointed to WastedLocker Ransomware being the reason Garmin was knocked offline.

This particular strain of ransomware is rather nasty and SentinelOne has done a wonderful deep dive into how it works here.

Garmin has seemingly begun the process of either decrypting its data or restoring backups. It’s unclear how the firm has dealt with this infection, but it is on the road to recovery.

“As our affected systems are restored, we expect some delays as the backlog of information is being processed. We are grateful for our customers’ patience and understanding during this incident and look forward to continuing to provide the exceptional customer service and support that has been our hallmark and tradition,” the firm said in a statement.

We now wait for more details from Garmin regarding the return of services. You can follow that journey here as Garmin Connect comes back online.

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