After being hit by a potential ransomware attack, Garmin had to halt many of its operations across apps, services, and products. This was informed by a notice on its website and also through Twitter, where the company said it’s undergoing maintenance to look for the issues. Meanwhile, customers of all its products have been suffering the outage.
Garmin Hit By a Ransomware Attack!
This outage also affects our call centers, 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 apologize for this inconvenience. (2/2)
— Garmin (@Garmin) July 23, 2020
Garmin is a well-known manufacturer of sportswear, wearables, and navigational equipment for automotive and aviation companies. The company has yesterday announced that’s it’s going under maintenance, and wouldn’t be able to offer some services.
This includes the Garmin Connect, where the working out users will be syncing data across devices, flyGarmin, an aviation database, and mapping service and support services like call, email, and chat options.
Apart from services, it’s halting some production services in Asia too. This was reported by iTHome, a Taiwanese news site that shared an internal memo passed by Garmin to its production houses in Taiwan. The memo didn’t exactly mention a ransomware attack but asked the production to halt on July 24th and July 25th for unplanned maintenance.
A Garmin spokesperson has declined to mention the incident’s cause as a ransomware attack when asked by ZDNet, but referred to its current notice and said the investigation is under process. But, right after the incident took place at Garmin corp, some employees have taken social media to report the internal havoc, which they all pointed out to a ransomware attack!
While the exact player behind this ransomware group isn’t known yet, it makes a strong sense to believe that only ransomware gangs have the potential to abruptly stop all services at once.
While the Garmin is still investigating the issue, many have reported being facing problems with the outage of services. This includes the users unable to sync through Garmin Connect, and also the flyGarmin users (pilots) unable to download the latest database for their flying.
