The smart wearable manufacturer Garmin was reportedly the victim of a ransomware attack that led to the shutdown of all online services. The company's GPS services are facing outage around the world, and if you are using a Garmin device, you could be in trouble. All services, including Garmin Connect, Garmin's fitness tracker app, Garmin's phone system, customer service, and messaging services, were affected by the outage.
Shortly after the outage, Garmin posted a message on Twitter informing users of the outage. However, according to the Taiwanese website It is the house, Garmin's IT team sent a note stating that the company's servers were compromised. According to some unconfirmed reports, Garmin has been attacked by the WastedLocker ransomware.
The WastedLocker ransomware is the latest strain believed to have been developed by Evil Corp. - a group behind popular ransomware, including Bit Paymer and Dridex. Evil Corp. has a habit of targeting companies based in the United States. While there is no concrete evidence to confirm that the outage occurred due to a ransomware attack, Garmin clarified that "maintenance" was the reason for stopping services.
We are currently experiencing an outage that is affecting Garmin Connect and as a result the Garmin Connect website and mobile app are currently unavailable. (1/2)
- Garmin (@Garmin) July 23, 2020
Unexpected maintenance lasted 12 hours in Japan and India, and the website and other services are back on line. This further fueled speculation that a ransomware attack was the reason for the long disruption of Garmin services.
Cybersecurity has become one of the major challenges for companies. The recent Twitter hack further proved that bad actors follow security mechanisms and that businesses need to invest more in securing user data and their digital assets.
