The IT Nerd

Garmin has had an outage for the last few days that has taken down its call centers and more importantly has taken down the Garmin Connect service that allows their athletes to sync and analyze their efforts. Reportedly the cause of this outage is a ransomware attack. Specifically the “WastedLocker” ransomware. While Garmin has unsurprisingly not confirmed this, many people who are in a position to know have. And those same sources have told Forbes that the price to end this nightmare is $10 million:

The ransom note tells the recipient to email one of two email addresses to “get a price for your data”. That price, Garmin’s sources have told BleepingComputer, is $10 million.

Now I am not an advocate of paying ransoms as the best way to protect yourself is to back up regularly and use those backups to rescue you from a situation like this. But it’s more complicated for Garmin. If they don’t pay the ransom, they will end up facing more and more anger from their user base made up of athletes, drivers, and pilots. The latter could be serious as pilots need to download maps to allow them to fly safely. And they can’t at the moment. But it’s all bad for Garmin the longer this goes on.

Conversely, if they do pay the ransom…. Well….. That’s complicated because of who’s behind this ransomware attack. Here’s what Bleeping Computer had to say:

Evil Corp (aka the Dridex gang) is a Russian-based cybercriminal group active since at least 2007 known to be the ones behind Dridex malware and for using ransomware as part of their attacks including Locky ransomware and their own ransomware strain known as BitPaymer.

The U.S. Treasury Department sanctioned evil Corp gang in December 2019 after being charged for using Dridex to cause more than $100 million in financial damages.

Due to this, it is a tricky situation for Garmin if they want to pay the ransom as they would potentially be violating United States sanctions.

So you have to wonder what Garmin is going to do as the clock is ticking, the money they are losing is growing, and the anger from their user base is growing. That’s not a great place to be if you’re Garmin.

This entry was posted on July 25, 2020 at 11:08 am and is filed under Commentary with tags Garmin. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.