Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Garmin services and production go down after ransomware attack

zdnet.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

221–230 of 232 posts

Re: Garmin services and production go down after ransomware attack

#221

Post by mattmaroon »

patja wrote: post #95
mattmaroon wrote: post #36

I guess I always assumed Garmin made most of their money on their aviation products, since they are so dominant and so expensive. And those are designed to rarely if ever connect to the internet. But I guess I was pretty off on that, they’re only 20%. On a side note the graphs of their revenues per year and by category show a company that successfully branched out when their former big category, automotive, which was…

My small sailboat has over $5k in Garmin navigation electronics. I love that whenever I've had a problem I can almost immediately reach a knowledgeable and helpful support employee in Kansas (I think?) to help me.

GPS (obviously) and what else? Weather? Fish finders? I know next to nothing about sailing.

Re: Garmin services and production go down after ransomware attack

#222

Post by petee »

petee wrote: post #102
exabrial wrote: 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…

Garmin Connect app won't even show you data sync'd from a watch unless its online and connected. Simple things like hours slept, or miles walked will not show. Right now it just has a "server maintenance" message, and won't show anything that uses a graph, or historical data...nothing is stored locally. On my recent hiking trip, the watch had no problem recording and sync'ing tracks, but the connect app refused to re…

Update: it won't load the weather anymore either. I'm fairly sick of the 'cloud' in general nowadays

Re: Garmin services and production go down after ransomware attack

#223

Post by patja »

mattmaroon wrote: post #221
patja wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My small sailboat has over $5k in Garmin navigation electronics. I love that whenever I've had a problem I can almost immediately reach a knowledgeable and helpful support employee in Kansas (I think?) to help me.

GPS (obviously) and what else? Weather? Fish finders? I know next to nothing about sailing.

Radar, wind speed and direction, water speed, depth, water temp, and I also have their forward scanning sonar transducer.

Re: Garmin services and production go down after ransomware attack

#224

Post by pmontra »

toomuchtodo wrote: post #105
exabrial wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It has a transactional guarantee of "maybe". I would _definitely_ not rely on this functionality for anything other than non-critical or time sensitive casual navigation on roadways. When I'm out in the bush, I need my device to be up and working locally. It seems that stuff designed in SV just assumes the lifestyle of 100% connectivity is universal.

Do you have any recommendations for digital mapping solutions that “just work” without connectivity?

OSMAnd.

https://osmand.net/

I installed it on my old phone (and the new one and my tablet .) I placed it on a handlebar mount and I'm mapping and navigating my vacation.

Re: Garmin services and production go down after ransomware attack

#225

Post by fionaellie »

Molpot wrote: post #12

Has anybody tried to reverse engineer garmin's bluetooth protocols? I often want to buy one of their smartwatches but the idea of having to install proprietary software on my phone kind of puts me off. I'd love to write my own software but I don't have any experience doing bluetooth RE.

I can barely keep my Vivoactive 4 to maintain a Bluetooth connection with my iPhone. So frustrating, because one of the most useful tools, find my phone, is rarely available due to a broken Bluetooth connection. !!!

Re: Garmin services and production go down after ransomware attack

#226

Post by fredrikaverpil »

aksss wrote: post #156

This might be a fine time to plug an app called RunGap - https://www.rungap.com/ Disclaimer: I'm not associated with them other than being a satisfied user of it. RunGap takes your activity data from one service and migrates it across others - so your activities you upload to Garmin Connect will be copied over to MapMyRun, Runalyze or whatever, including DropBox and/or iCloud. It won't help you now, but in the future…

There's also https://tapiriik.com for syncing.

Re: Garmin services and production go down after ransomware attack

#227

Post by 22fred »

parliament32 wrote: post #120
kylebarron wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What about their Inreach products, which are designed for backcountry SOS emergency calls to search and rescue? That certainly needs a network.

Messaging and SOS are up, billing is the only thing that's down: https://status.inreach.garmin.com/

InReach messaging was down for quite some time. It worked wed am, did not work at all after that (either sending or receiving) through mid day fri at which point sending was very spotty (messages sent to groups were not received by all group members). Appears to have improved by Friday evening but not 100% even then. Saturday 25th it seems to be working... no idea if SOS was similarly impacted but I would suspect it may have been.

Re: Garmin services and production go down after ransomware attack

#228

Post by 22fred »

SketchySeaBeast wrote: post #34

A close relation of mine got sick back country hiking and needed to text for someone to meet at a rendezous just this week using Garmin's texting services - I hope that this doesn't last long, I'd hate to think of what would happen if he'd tried to ask for help today. Edit: Looks like Garmin 'Explore' is still up, so maybe it'd still be OK.

InReach messaging did NOT work for quite some time. wed mid day through late Friday no send or receive at all on ours. Fri evening it was sporadic send/receive - not all messages were going through to all parties. Saturday 25th it seems to be working correctly.

Re: Garmin services and production go down after ransomware attack

#229

Post by thirdsun »

jacquesm wrote: post #59

The internet-of-things that aren't really your things strikes again. When will manufacturers learn that their hardware should function even if their services are down? The whole account/subscription tacked on for no apparent reason thing is highly irritating, and Garmin is actually better than most.

> The whole account/subscription tacked on for no apparent reason thing is highly irritating, and Garmin is actually better than most.

I agree that the Garmin’s app/services should be more useful without an internet connection, but I think it’s fair to say that these days customers want and expect an ecosystem that syncs their data and ties in Garmin’s devices. I wouldn’t call such an essential feature tacked on.

Re: Garmin services and production go down after ransomware attack

#230

Post by hamburglar »

Molpot wrote: post #12

Has anybody tried to reverse engineer garmin's bluetooth protocols? I often want to buy one of their smartwatches but the idea of having to install proprietary software on my phone kind of puts me off. I'd love to write my own software but I don't have any experience doing bluetooth RE.

And since someone from Garmin is definitely reading this: Dear Garmin: we really want you to use open protocols so we don't have to install garbage software on our phones. I have an old "don't care" iphone that I use for software that I absolutely must install just to use a device. This is inconvenient and means I can only use certain functionality for that device at home. More often, I just pass on devices that need custom mobile software in order to work.

Open your protocols and you'll get lots of nerdy cheerleaders for your devices.

Post reply on HN