Garmin, the maker of fitness trackers, smartwatches and GPS-based wearable devices, is currently dealing with a massive worldwide service interruption after getting hit by a targeted ransomware attack, an employee of the company told The Hacker News on condition of anonymity.
The company’s website and the Twitter account say, “We are currently experiencing an outage that affects Garmin.com and Garmin Connect.”
“This outage also affects our call centres, 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 apologise for this inconvenience.”
As a result, the company yesterday was forced to temporarily shut down some of its connected services, including Garmin Express, Garmin Connect mobile, and the website—restricting millions of its users from accessing the cloud services or even syncing their watches locally to the app.
Though not much information is available on technicalities of the cyber attack, some local media reports claim hackers have managed to compromise the company’s application and database servers with ransomware.
It also says Garmin has sent announcements to its IT staff in Taiwan-based factories announcing the next two days of planned maintenance, i.e., July 24 and 25.
Multiple sources in the cybersecurity community suggest that the cyberattack may have involved WastedLocker, one of the targeted ransomware gang, known as the Evil Corp or Dridex.
images from Hacker News
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