I have been using Garmin products since day one. Literally. I started flying in 1990 and Garmin was formed in 1989. As a tech-head, I was an early adopter of GPS technology while flying airplanes and soon had Garmin avionics installed in my airplanes. Later I had them on my motorcycles and cars, and still today use them extensively on my motorcycles and bicycles.
Hence I was quite surprised last week when I went to update my Garmin Montana and my computer said the Garmin servers could not be contacted. I tried using Garmin Connect on my iPhone and got an error once again that the Garmin servers could not be found. I started doing a bit of digging and discovered that Garmin had been hit with a major ransomware attack, locking up untold customer data, help desk systems, map downloads, and many other services. Garmin is used in military, commercial aviation, logistics, delivery, and a host of other industries. This outage had a major affect on not only casual users, but industries and defense as well.
Most people would think a company as large and successful as Garmin would have the technical and financial ability to protect themselves from such wide-spread malware. But security is hard. Really, really hard. And there are not even close to enough security professionals around to fill all the holes. Companies are adopting AI-based technology such as FortiEDR and FortiSOAR, but those technologies also take skill and time to implement properly. And they are still only as strong as the technicians implementing them.
That is why companies are hiring companies such as SageNet to help them secure their environment. SageNet managed hundreds of thousands of network connections daily. We know how to implement and automate security, monitor for anomalies, and react before bad things happen.
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