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Garmin services and production go down after ransomware attack

zdnet.com

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Re: Garmin services and production go down after ransomware attack

#171
post #143
post #127

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Interesting. It surprises me how BAD most of Garmin's software is. They regularly break syncing functionality for weeks at a time. Sometimes watches need reboots to figure out how to sync to a phone. The sunrise/sunset graph on my $600 watch has NEVER been right. You can push activities to your Garmin account but they don't bother engineering in any additional functionality, eg, to show your last activity if uploaded…

I think they're hardware engineering focused, not software engineering. Hence your Forerunner 945 will last most of a week (minus gas-enabled exercise time), where your Apple Watch goes about 2 days at most.

In that case, perhaps they should open source the software or open the hardware interface.

Re: Garmin services and production go down after ransomware attack

#172
post #169

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Total speculation, my guess is WastedLocker. It has been hitting all types of companies in the past few months. Have a friend who's company was hit recently. They were somehow were able to encrypt the backups.

My vote is something's being held for ransom like DNS or account access rather than traditional storage encryption. It's pretty impressive if storage encryption crossed so many network boundaries and affected so many diverse resource types - phones, chat, email, website, distributed app platform. What other central resource besides DNS would have such a broad impact?

Or their network isolation is very poor, super common in older tech companies.

Re: Garmin services and production go down after ransomware attack

#173

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Source? Do you work there? Do you know whats the ransomware used or how much they're demanding?

Total speculation, my guess is WastedLocker. It has been hitting all types of companies in the past few months. Have a friend who's company was hit recently. They were somehow were able to encrypt the backups.

> Total speculation

The link was updated more than 2 hours before your comment to a zdnet article that even mentions a WastedLocker variant.

Re: Garmin services and production go down after ransomware attack

#174
post #169

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Total speculation, my guess is WastedLocker. It has been hitting all types of companies in the past few months. Have a friend who's company was hit recently. They were somehow were able to encrypt the backups.

My vote is something's being held for ransom like DNS or account access rather than traditional storage encryption. It's pretty impressive if storage encryption crossed so many network boundaries and affected so many diverse resource types - phones, chat, email, website, distributed app platform. What other central resource besides DNS would have such a broad impact?

Or they're hugely Windows based (Exchange, SQL Server, AD Servers, etc) and the same exploit got into a huge number of diverse machines.

Or shudder far reaching writeable network mounts.

Re: Garmin services and production go down after ransomware attack

#175
post #6

Their products are designed to work offline. Despite the cloud being down I have full local functionality right now. (Though I can't see my history, surprised they don't cache that locally). Last year when I did a 9-day canoe trip with no cell phone reception, all of my Garmin gear worked flawlessly (wearables, navigation devices, and their offline map app). Can't say the same about my friends iWatches/fitbits or eve…

I was give a garmin vivofit 3 as a gift and was soured by the fact that I had to create an account and log in to set the time . I've been very slowly working on a fork of gadgetbridge[1] to support the vivofit 3 for a while now and can successfuly set the time with no account! 1: https://github.com/mjsir911/gadgetbridge

> to set the time.

A month or two ago I was stumped by this on my Forerunner 735: the time was wrong but I could not find a way to set it, even after a factory reset. Turns out the time sets itself from GPS after a solid lock, but you have to make it trigger a lock, by e.g starting an activity. Only after the on-device setup and having a correct time did I sync it with the app (it wasn’t even phone paired)

Re: Garmin services and production go down after ransomware attack

#176

Talked to someone I know there who said it looked like ransomware targeting all windows boxes, including those connected via VPN.

Either the people in charge of security were dumb (dealt with some of those) or they were smart and the executives refused to listen or fund them (met those as well) or both (and have worked at places like that too). I wonder how many companies fall into these categories.

Re: Garmin services and production go down after ransomware attack

#177
post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I can't alter a watch face - i.e. alter the fields displayed. I'm not wanting to download a new face, just alter one already download and present in the app and on the watch, or alter any data fields around specific activities. I get syncing to any 3rd party service is clearly totally out unless I manually transfer the .fit file via USB and I understand why this would need their servers, although it would be good if…

There is absolutely no reason for requiring an internet connection for basic features such as setting an alarm or the 12/24h time format. I contacted Garmin customer support and they replied with corporate PR stuff, not answering my questions. I sold the watch a couple weeks later, won't buy Garmin again.

I can do all of that directly on my 735.

Re: Garmin services and production go down after ransomware attack

#178

This is frustrating. I have a Garmin Fenix 6X Sapphire (that I absolutely love) and on seeing this headline I checked the Connect app on my phone and sure enough I cannot access any of my previous activities. You'd think that in this day and age of phones with 128GB+ storage that they'd be caching at least some of your historical data locally, but nope it's all in the cloud, which is currently inaccessible.

I think working at a crypto startup has changed my life because I see stuff we store about our clients as a total liability...

Re: Garmin services and production go down after ransomware attack

#179

Hm. I recently bought a Garmin Inreach Mini (satellite emergency communication device), intending to use it for some long backcountry hiking/backpacking trips I'm planning on taking. Really hope this isn't effecting their emergency service/emergency communication devices. Subscription management, at a minimum, was via the Garmin website.

I suspended my inReach plan during the lockdown but was about to re-enable it for a motorcycle camping trip next weekend. Hope the website is back up in time!

Re: Garmin services and production go down after ransomware attack

#180
post #45
post #6

Their products are designed to work offline. Despite the cloud being down I have full local functionality right now. (Though I can't see my history, surprised they don't cache that locally). Last year when I did a 9-day canoe trip with no cell phone reception, all of my Garmin gear worked flawlessly (wearables, navigation devices, and their offline map app). Can't say the same about my friends iWatches/fitbits or eve…

FYI for anyone else reading: Google maps lets you download maps for offline use.

Osmand has full offline navigational functionality for free and uses as well as contributes to the open street maps data set instead of a proprietary one. I've used it to save my bacon a few times when I tried to start navigation well away from cell coverage.
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