Garmin has offered a benign update short on detail after three days of its services being interrupted by what international reports have described as a ransomware attack.
The company, whose devices are very popular in cycling,
was forced to shut its website and call centres as well as a number of other
online services.
The shutdown was so extensive that the company closed its
customer services facilities including phone lines, email and online chat.
A ransomware attack involves files being encrypted by the
hackers responsible for the attack, with a demand for millions of dollars
before a targeted company would be allowed access to the files again.
While Garmin first issued a statement three days ago about the interruption to its services, which meant cyclists and other athletes were unable to upload activities, that public message suggested the services were down due to essential maintenance.
Advertisement
On Saturday evening Irish time it issued another update,
though the company provided no substantive detail as to the cause of the
widespread problems across its services.
The “outage”, as Garmin has described it, extends to
services it offers to pilots and access to which is a legal requirement before
some flights can take to the skies.
Related News
“Garmin is currently experiencing an outage that affects Garmin services including Garmin Connect and Garmin Pilot,” the company said on Saturday evening, by which time some services had returned.
“As a result of the outage, some features and services
across these platforms are unavailable to customers.
“Additionally, our product support call centers 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 apologise for the inconvenience. Additional updates will be
provided as they become available.”
In the statement Tweeted out on Saturday evening Garmin
added: “Although Garmin Connect is not accessible during the outage, activity
and health and wellness data collected from Garmin devices during the outage is
stored on the device and will appear in Garmin Connect once the user syncs
their device.
“Garmin has no indication that this outage has affected
your data, including activity, payment or other personal information.”
The smart watch and wearables company has not said the
problems were caused by a ransomware attack but many technology-based media
outlets in the US and Asia have report it is a ransomware cyber attack, citing
company staff describing such an attack.
The reports suggested the issues, which are ongoing and
began on Thursday, have been caused by a WastedLocker ransomware attack.
A report on bleepingcomputer.com – with that website
saying it had spoken to sources with direct knowledge of what has been happening
– stated Garmin had performed a hard shutdown of all devices hosted in a data
center to prevent them from possibly being encrypted by the attackers.
It also said Garmin IT personnel had tried to remotely
shut down all computers on the network as devices were being encrypted and that
employees were told to shut down any computer on the network that they had
access to.
However, while a growing number of reports are emerging
saying Garmin was being targeted in a ransomware attack, Garmin has said
nothing to suggest such an attack was underway.
Topics
