14 DAY TRIAL // Garmin has recently confirmed that the recent outage that took most of its services offline was the result of a hack attack that locked access to some of its systems.
The ransomware attack happened on July 23, and access to some Garmin services has been restored after some five days, with the company confirming that activities based on the official website, customer support, company communications, and custom facing applications like Garmin Connect were affected.
Garmin doesn’t provide any information regrading the group of hackers that might be behind the attack, but recent reports have suggested that the outage was caused by Russian-based Evil Corp.
The company explains that no customer data was accessed as a result of the attack, and Garmin Pay data is completely secure. Furthermore, Garmin says, no products were impacted, as only online services were taken down. This means that you could still use your Garmin smartwatch, but you weren’t able to connect to Garmin’s servers for syncing.
Services coming back online
Garmin is still working on recovering after the attack, and its services are one by one brought back online.
“Affected systems are being restored and we expect to return to normal operation over the next few days. We do not expect any material impact to our operations or financial results because of this outage,” Garmin says.
“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.”
According to reports that haven’t been confirmed, the group of hackers that compromised Garmin’s servers asked for a $10 million ransom. Garmin reportedly shut down systems in two major factories in an attempt to recover after the breach and restore backups.