Anyone here use 'Garmin Services' (Smartwatch and wearables)

Paddlers' Place
#1

Even though culprits of these kind of attacks aren’t easy to find, the penalty of those caught should be made SEVERE.
They are only going to get worse and worse.

I’ve got a Garmin 86, but a ‘dumb’ one, doesn’t have the ‘InReach’ feature (don’t know if the InReach is affected or not).
(btw, quick review: stick with the 78 (if you don’t need InReach) )

#2

Discovered the attack on Garmin yesterday when I tried to sync my Garmin Forerunner.

ALL Garmin services are down; website, forum, phones, emails, and even Garmin’s aviation navigational services, which is really serious for pilots. Maps cannot be downloaded.

I carry the Forerunner on my boat each time I paddle. Am just glad that I’ve also kept a spreadsheet copy of the data from the getgo. In the interim, I’m just noting the time and miles in the spreadsheet and will play catch-up whenever it gets working again. My Apple Watch records HR info so that’s not a problem. It’s the paddling speed that’s missing - but in this heat and humidity, that’s probably a good thing since that kind of weather turns me into a sloth.

#3

For any other Garmin users here, Garmin has set up system status page: https://connect.garmin.com/status/

One item of good news is that inReach SOS and messaging are fully functional and are not impacted by the outage.

#4

I noticed today that my instinct wasn’t playing nicely with the app, and found out about their quite serious outage. Glad to hear the inreach isn’t affected, but that’s really another service provider alltogether. Garmin is just fortunate enough to own the billing rights, as far as I know.

I can’t imagine the impact to aviation is too serious, as a typical navigation database is only updated every 28 days, and you always have either the previous and current revisions, or the current and next revision loaded into the onboard database. Even if you’re out of date, using a current chart to verify the accuracy of your loaded routing is perfectly legal, so long as you follow a few other routing rules such as not flying over any gps only fixes. Folks using handheld devices that update via a download may be unable to get some things on their iPads and whatnot, but there’s no real impact to serious navigation usage.

#5

Garmin has limited services back up and running. Was able to download several days of data from my Forerunner using Garmin Connect.

Hoping that Garmin restored from its own backups and didn’t pay ransomware. Might find that out on Wednesday when it’s earning report is made public.

#6

Good to hear, does sound like things are coming back on.

Russian hacker gang Evil Corp.


Sounds like it’s from a TV show.
Though much more serious than entertainment, I think the penalty for stuff like this should be just short of the death penalty.
Wait till they start disabling the satellites.
#7

After syncing today’s paddle data, I checked my activities back to 2018. Nothing appeared to be missing so it seems that data wasn’t affected.

Here’s an excellent article on the topic. I wasn’t aware that off-line back-ups offer the best protection.