The malfunction has been going on for almost thirty hours and Garmin leaves little to say about it. Anyone who has exercised will have to manually upload his or her activities to, for example, Strava. Whether friends and acquaintances should tell about it themselves.
Ransomware
Garmin Netherlands will not respond to reports that hackers have taken the computer network hostage. A spokeswoman calls this speculation, “because this has not been confirmed at all.” “As soon as we know what’s going on, we will communicate about it immediately.”
Garmin reports a malfunction in the Connect app. “This outage is also affecting our call centers and we are currently unable to receive calls, emails or online chats. We are working to resolve this issue as soon as possible.”
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Big problem
If hackers have taken Garmin’s computer network hostage, the company has a big problem. Without paying, it is virtually impossible to regain access, says cyber security expert Rickey Gevers.
We rarely hear how hackers gain access to a company network. For example, it comes with a false invoice by email. “When an employee opens such a Word or Excel file, they are asked to accept macros. These are normally used to automate actions, but macros can also be misused by malicious parties. They can hide a piece of code in this case from a distance. take over the computer. “
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Once hackers have taken over one computer, not much happens. “They will first investigate who they have caught,” says Gevers. “Such phishing emails are sent in bulk. If they find out it’s a computer within Garmin, they’ve got a big fish.”
Unbreakable code
From that one computer they will then try to hack the corporate network. “Then they roll out ransomware to all computers. All files are encrypted with an unbreakable code. Also the backup systems.”
Computers will no longer be usable, but will be shown a message: ‘go to this website and pay’. Usually this involves an amount in bitcoin.
“In the case of such large companies, it is about tons,” says Gevers. “The police in the Netherlands advise against paying, but such large companies lose tons per day when they are not operational.” To put additional pressure on companies, hackers sometimes risk disclosing customer data. “If privacy-sensitive data is exposed on the street, that’s even a bit worse.”
It usually takes three days from the time a company is hacked to regain access to their data. “Decrypting yourself would be a matter of years. If they could do it,” says Gevers. “The encryption is often watertight, with few exceptions.”
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Little comfort to Garmin users is that their sports activities are unlikely to disappear into thin air. Their activities are not stored on the internet, but on their watch or navigation system.
In many cases, uploading an activity to Strava can also be done manually:
- Connect your Garmin to the computer with a USB cable
- Go to Garmin
- Open dan de map Activities
- Sort the files by date and select the desired activity
- Upload manually to Strava: https://www.strava.com/upload/select
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