Garmin reportedly paid a massive ransom to hackers

Following Garmin’s massive outage two weeks ago which saw their systems brought to a complete standstill, we’re finally starting to get reports about what exactly happened at the company.

According to a new report from Sky News, Garmin allegedly paid a multi-million dollar sum through a ransomware negotiation company called Arete IR, in order for them to recover data that was held hostage by the attack. This followed a report from BleepingComputer last week that Garmin had received a decryption key to access data encrypted by the virus, and that the initial ransom demand was for a massive $10 million.

Garmin had previously confirmed that they had been hit by a strain of ransomware called WastedLocker, which is believed to have been developed by individuals linked to a Russia-based hacking group. In that statement, they simply reassured customers that their data was safe and did not go into any detail on exactly what was required to restore the systems back to normal.

It’s perhaps no surprise that the company is keeping quite secretive about the whole affair, especially in trying to uncover the vulnerabilities that led to the hackers gaining access to the information in the first place. If they did indeed pay a large sum of money though, expect it to form part of their next earnings call where we will probably know the full extent of what was paid. For a company the size of Garmin, 10 million is probably still fairly small, but for the hackers involved, that would be a massive payday and bring them their money heist moment.

Now excuse me while I go and brush up on my hacking skills to try and pull off a similar fortune, buy an island and forget about all the woes of this world.

Last Updated: August 6, 2020