Garmin paid a kidnapper’s ransom to get our data back

Have you been having trouble uploading your swim from your watch to Strava or other online platform recently?

Garmin says all platforms and systems are back online, but what they didn’t say is that they (apparently) dodged US sanctions to pay ruthless criminals US$10 million in bitcoin to get our data back.

It seems unbelievable that a large respectable company would pay off criminals at all. It seems to be a breach of US government sanctions against the makers of NetWalker, the ransomware behind the attack.

But Garmin caved in less than three days and reportedly apparently knew they were possibly in breach of the law.

There is more on this story at my swim coaching site.