Garmin Pays Ransom – How Much?

Garmin Pays Ransom – How Much? 

You might be one of the millions of people who track their exercise activity through Garmin devices. So, did you notice that the free Garmin site was down for several days? Larry wanted to upload his bike rides, but the site was down – and the next day, and the next day; very unusual.

Turns out their systems were hacked and Garmin was held hostage – not just one system but a lot of their systems, including their smartwatches and aviation products. Not only were the serious exercise trackers unable to log in, but other products were impacted including required daily uploads of data from pilots.

I’m sure there’ll be more in the news in the coming weeks, but they finally reported that they paid, are you ready, a $10 million ransom to the hackers to get their data back. The rumor is that the hackers were part of the Evil Corp, a Russia-based hacker group.

Funny how many users of this ‘free’ software were so incensed when it wasn’t available – people, it’s ‘free.’ A bigger question should be whether the ‘hack’ resulted in any of their personal data being compromised. As of the most recent news reports, this has not been answered yet, only that the data was held for ransom.

So, if you have online data that’s important to you, consider what you would do if the information wasn’t available tomorrow. You should also protect your online user accounts, change your passwords, even sign up for our Dark Web scanning service, and stay on top of your digital world. The Dark Web monitoring looks for any compromised passwords, personal info (answers to those security questions you fill out), anything associated with your email account. It’s quite sobering to see your password out there for sale!

If you have online information that is critical to you and your family – personal bank information, insurance, utilities – make sure you have a Plan B in case something happens. How would you get this critical information if tomorrow, it was no longer available? – CMW