Garmin, a maker of smartwatches and wearables, has shut down many of its services to deal with a ransomware attack that has encrypted its internal network and some production systems . The company is currently planning to take a number of measures to deal with the consequences of the attack, including shutting down its official website, its “Garmin Connect” user data synchronization service , and even some production lines in Asia.
The smartwatch and wearables manufacturer, through posts shared on its website and Twitter, stated that this outage also affected its call centers, resulting in the company being unable to answer calls, emails and online chats, thus making it impossible to communicate with customers.
The incident, of course, did not go unnoticed, but it caused many concerns and questions among the company's customers, most of whom rely on the "Garmin Connect" service to synchronize data about routes and bike rides to servers , which were down after the ransomware attack.
Garmin, however, refused to confirm that the outage was caused by a ransomware attack. However, since the incident occurred on July 23, at approximately 03:00 UTC, several Garmin employees shared details about it on social media . It is worth noting that all of the company’s employees spoke of a ransomware attack. Some Garmin employees even went so far as to attribute the incident to a new ransomware strain that appeared earlier this year, WastedLocker. However, the incident appears to be much more serious and devastating than Garmin reported in its posts on its official website and Twitter.
iThome, a Taiwanese news site covering IT and smart devices, published a notice sent by Garmin’s IT staff to its factories in Taiwan, announcing a scheduled two-day maintenance operation for Friday and Saturday, July 24 and 25. While the notice made no mention of a ransomware attack, sources told the Taiwanese news site that the incident was caused by a “virus.”.
In today's cybersecurity landscape, ransomware attacks alone can lead companies to shut down their production lines, online services, websites, email servers, and call centers within hours and enter "maintenance mode."
Meanwhile, Garmin users are sharing tips online about how to save their running and cycling data to Garmin partner services like Strava to avoid losing their workout-related information until Garmin can fix the issue.
