If you are a user of a Garmin smartwatch, you should change the password immediately. The well-known manufacturer of sports wearables has confirmed what we already feared: they have been hacked.
The North American company was the victim of ransomware, a type of attack that consists of encrypting the company’s data and demanding a ransom in the form of money. According to Sky News reports, the company could have made the payment to regain control of its systems.
The Company Was Paralyzed For Several Days
Surely if you used Garmin devices you realized that something strange was happening. Since last Thursday the company has been experiencing problems and users could not synchronize their workouts with sports tracking applications like Strava. Now the company has recognized that the problem came from a hack in its systems.
This hack was on a large scale, it not only affected the synchronization of user data. As Garmin itself has confirmed, all of its online services have been disrupted, including website functions, customer service, customer applications, and company communications. In other words, the company was totally paralyzed by the action of hackers.
Garmin has ensured that there is no indication that hackers have accessed, lost, or stolen customer data. Not even Garmin Pay’s payment information. However, if you are a Garmin user, you should change the password for your services.
The Services Already Work
After some very difficult days, the North American company seems to have regained control of its systems, as all its services have begun to be restored. The company has reported that the affected systems are being restored and that they expect to return to normal operations in the coming days.
This sudden recovery suggests that the company has chosen to pay the ransom requested by the hackers. According to Sky News reports, Garmin would have made the payment to the attackers to obtain the decryption key and regain control of their systems. Company employees confirmed to ZDNet last week that Garmin was targeted with the WastedLocker ransomware, a type of cyber attack generally associated with the Russian hacker group Evil Corp.
We do not know if it will ever be confirmed, but if so, Garmin could get into serious trouble, since the United States Treasury prohibited users and companies in the United States from making transactions with this group. For this same reason, according to anonymous Garmin sources, the payment would not have been made directly to the group.
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