You probably already know that Garmin suffered a major outage recently that temporarily disconnected many of the company’s systems and services.
The problem was a ransomware attack, an attack that we explain in this link, which means that the criminals blocked access to your systems and only unlocked it in exchange for a ransom.
Now everything is working well, but according to Sky News, Garmin paid a multimillion-dollar ransom through an external company called Arete Incident Response to regain access to its files and systems.
Neither Garmin nor Arete have confirmed it, in the same way that it is not yet known who was behind the attack or who was paid the alleged ransom. Some security researchers believe it was the WastedLocker ransomware, which is linked to a group of Russian cybercriminals, but nothing has been officially confirmed so far.
The organization that could be the cause of the theft would be Evil Corp, which has already been accused of being responsible for developing and distributing another form of malware called Dridex.
Arete Incident Response, the company that allegedly mediated the payment, helps companies protect their networks and resolve attacks. This company told Sky News that it follows all recommended and required assessments to ensure compliance with US trade sanctions laws, without elaborating on the matter.
