Garmin Concedes & Pays Millions in Ransom

garmin

Garmin, the producer of high-class fitness gadgets was attacked by a group of hijackers. Those hijackers have inserted ransomware that disabled most of the services associated with these gadgets. This attack posed a massive negative impact on the people who are using the Garmin applications. It is still unknown who was the mastermind behind this entire operation. 

Researchers have suspected that there is a team of hackers named Evil Corporation who is responsible for this. This organization is from Russia and they are known for such crimes. Garmin paid a huge amount of money to get back the encryption but it is still unknown where and to whom the money went as a ransom. 

What actually happened?

The attack went off in the month of July 23rd. It started affecting the wearables of Garmin. Then slowly and steadily, it went on to the servers. But surprisingly, Garmin didn’t face any loss of customer data. After a few days, some of its services started to come online but the fitness giant failed to retrieve the entire functionality. 

The fitness giant has faced a drastic blow when it was hit by a strain of ransomware named WastedLocker. It is a new variant of ransomware that encrypts the entire data in a server in the exchange of data currency. 

Garmin Fights back… Fulfilling the Demand

Yes, the demand was humongous. It was the amount of $10 million dollars. Experts and researchers are still confused about a few systems of Garmin that came online. Did Garmin pay the ransom? If they paid it, then to whom did they pay? And other questions are still unanswered. 

Other Ransomware Attacks

Apart from Garmin, there are other organizations that faced ransomware attacks. Canon and Travelex are the two renowned companies that faced ransomware attacks. Apart from the organizations, government agencies, educational universities are on the victim list.

Future Security Measures 

As Garmin was the victim, in the upcoming days, many other organizations can also get affected. That is why all the people of the United States of America are hoping for a safe internet firewall. As the ransomware came from Russia, many people are accusing the Russian president of not looking up to this matter. 

Experts say that hackers are especially targeting American organizations. Their intention is to absorb all the money as much as possible. That is why privacy matters the most. Garmin had a little choice of saving their desk. That is why they gave away the ransom. So, people have to understand that the other small or medium companies are not out of the list. Rather, it will be much easier to penetrate through their firewalls. 

As all the vital information associated with the small, medium, and large organizations are driven by computers, the protection of data is important. That is why the tech experts suggest backing up their data daily. On the other hand, the installation of the security software must be intact to ensure that everything is safe.