Garmin obtains decryption key after ransomware attack

https://news.sky.com/story/garmin-obtains-decryption-key-after-ransomware-attack-12036761

by thinkmassive • 6 years ago

181 119 6 years ago

news.sky.com

Alex39174• 6 years ago

If a payment was made through a third party it could also be covered by the Treasury sanctions, which warn: "Foreign persons may be subject to secondary sanctions for knowingly facilitating a significant transaction or transactions with these designated persons."

I accidentally took a phone call for a job that basically involved using Bitcoin to launder money to send ransom payments to terrorists. They told me that although it's technically illegal, the U.S. government has never prosecuted anyone for paying a ransom. I noped out after the first phone call for obvious reasons, but it was pretty interesting just to learn about the industry.

Anyway when Garmin says they didn't pay the ransom themselves, they are telling the truth, instead they would have used this company or one of their competitors. You can't just open a Coinbase Pro account and buy 10 million BTC and transfer it your first day. No bank is going to allow you to do that, since they would then be liable for facilitating that transaction. Instead you need to contract with a company that specializes in ransom payments and has already accumulated the crypto in advance. Then you pay them a percentage for their services.

CobrastanJorji• 6 years ago

Weird. I would think that while it's not worth the government's time to go after individual companies paying off ransoms, it would definitely be worth their time to go after a business professionally focused on paying illegal ransoms who tell interview candidates that they are aware that what they do is illegal.

Alex39174• 6 years ago

Maybe, maybe not. It's technically illegal to grow or possess any amount of weed, but in practice you don't get prosecuted (by the feds) unless you have over 100 plants or thousands of pounds. Until ~2004 it was illegal for native Americans to be within Boston city limits.

There are thousands of things that are illegal, but in practice are rarely or ever prosecuted, even in cases where people are violating those laws at pretty significant scales.

In my case that's not a risk I'd be willing to take, but I can see why other people would. The reason it's not prosecuted though isn't because of companies, it's because there are lots of wealthy people who travel overseas and then get kidnapped, and the government isn't going to prosecute their families for paying to not have their kids dismembered and the videos posted on YouTube. The reason companies aren't prosecuted is mainly because once you decide not to prosecute families for doing this, then anyone else can make an equal protection argument.

meowface3• 6 years ago

It's a pretty legit business model; just because it's illegal doesn't necessarily mean the government wants to go after them. "Focused on paying illegal ransoms" = "allows companies to recover from devastating attacks by being a middle-man for paying the extortion fee and getting the decryption keys". It's probably one of those things that the government tells people not to do, but acknowledges is inevitable in many cases.

A company I worked at once had a meeting with such a firm, and it all sounded pretty reasonable to me. Obviously, one would hope the company has backups (which are stored in a place that can't itself become encrypted), but if they don't, sometimes the cost of paying the ransom is far, far lower than the cost of staying down. These middle-man firms have probably saved companies from enormous amounts of damage. Another commenter claimed these companies are often in cahoots with the ransomers, which maybe is sometimes true, but I highly doubt it in the case of the company we dealt with, or other US-based companies with physical locations that meet on-site.

Of course in an ideal world no one wants to reward criminals, but just to give an extreme example, if someone kidnapped one of your children and held them hostage, you'd probably pay anything to get them back, and that's not far off from the situation some ransomware-affected companies end up in.

dogma1138• 6 years ago

Paying ransom is illegal in some jurisdictions because it’s seems to be the easy way to prevent ransoms if it works or not I don’t know.

Ransom works when the target is capable and has sufficient incentive to pay out, if you make it so that you’ll face jail time as a CEO who orders a ransom to be paid out it’s quite likely might reduce acts of ransom.

I know that there is grey area that is common in the energy and global construction sectors where companies might not be able to pay ransom legally essentially have a ransom insurance so when 3 of your workers get kidnapped in Djibouti you have your “insurance company” which also often facilitates negotiations, extraction and repatriation handle the case.

(This is also common for other reasons, especially liability reduction if something goes wrong the company can wash their hands of the case and send the families after the “insurance provider”.)

There is also the grey area of “private emergency services” which range from private medevac on standby to assault teams capable of executing asset recovery missions some even take pride of being able and willing to perform prison breaks.

brianbreslin• 6 years ago

I heard on NPR I think that some of these middlemen companies are actually often in cahoots with the ransomware distributors.

superhuzza2• 6 years ago

I remember reading a fascinating article on the nature of the companies that deal with ransomware. I think it was this one.

The TLDR is that these middleman companies allow ransomware victims to both pay the fine and save face, by acting as if they didn't pay the fine. The perpetrators prefer to deal with the middlemen as they know how to pay in crypto, and are predictable - the middleman and the hackers are closer to partners than adversaries.

https://features.propublica.org/ransomware/ransomware-attack...

gpm• 6 years ago

I'm curious, when you say terrorist, do you mean groups like Evil Corp (mentioned in the article), or do you mean groups of more "traditional" terrorists funding themselves via malware?

Edit: Or were the ransomware payments at hand not even malware related, but more "traditional" ransoms?

SkyBelow2• 6 years ago

If I handed you $110 to go buy $100 of drugs, then I'm still paying for the drugs. What judge would be willing to allow such a gotcha to actually pass? There would be a massive industry for legally paying for illegal things if that were the case.

Then again, the acceptability of a gotcha seems to correlate more with the amount of money spent on lawyers than on the rationality of the gotcha, so as long as they have a large enough legal department the worse they'll have is a fine that they likely already included in the cost of the attack.

mytailorisrich2• 6 years ago

I don't think that it is illegal to pay a ransom in general under US law. It is illegal to receive a ransom, though. As mentioned in the article, they are caveats related to terrorism and to dealing with entities on sanctions lists.

Now, if Garmin obtained the decryption keys, as is alleged in the article, it is clear that they paid. Note that the 'anonymous sources' cited did not even deny payment but only used a weasel turn of phrase 'did not directly make a payment', which is quite different from 'did not pay'. My best guess, if a payment was made, is that they hired people experts in dealing with these situations who arranged everything and who will bill for 'consulting services'...

Alex39174• 6 years ago

I don't think that it is illegal to pay a ransom in general under US law.

I mean I’m pretty sure you’re not allowed to go wire money to Al Qaeda, or to conspire to evade anti money laundering controls in order to do so.

tzs• 6 years ago

They told me that although it's technically illegal, the U.S. government has never prosecuted anyone for paying a ransom

If I was going to take a job doing something that is illegal, I think I might prefer one where the government has prosecuted people. Then I could look at those cases and see what people got off with just probation, which got light sentences, which got harsh sentences, what kind of plea deals were offered. Then I could at least have a decent chance of figuring out if the pay and benefits are worth the risk.

If they haven't prosecuted anyone (and this is not a line of work that has been around for a very long time), I'd worry that they just haven't gotten around to it yet, and I could end up being the first. Being first could be very bad, because they might be pushing for a harsh sentence to discourage others or encourage people prosecuted later to take plea bargains.

WrtCdEvrydy2• 6 years ago

To be honest, it's probably a third part company.

Funny enough, back when ransomware was simpler and used the same encryption key, we managed to recover one place by using Memory Forensics on a fucked machine.

I wonder if extracting the key, decrypting the files to not pay $100,000 in BTC would be illegal in some way.

bt3• 6 years ago

It's not clear to me from the article that Garmin did in fact get the decryption key. There's enough verbiage suggesting they didn't pay the ransom, so are we to assume they had other means?

It also took Garmin quite awhile to acknowledge the ongoing situation formally (their outage page has been accurate with red lights across the board). Could it be that Garmin just started to spin up more hardware and began a migration of their last backups? (I'm so far removed from how their service operates so apologies if this sounds impractical)

vb6sp6• 6 years ago

There's enough verbiage suggesting they didn't pay the ransom

It says they "did not directly make a payment to the hackers". You can't just take 10mil and convert it to bitcoin. My best guess is that a 3rd party made the payment and garmin will be reimbursing

NotSammyHagar4• 6 years ago

saying they did not directly make a payment makes it certain someone paid.

usrusr4• 6 years ago

They might have paid one of those ransomware subcontractors who claim to solve the problem on a technical level while they actually just pass on the money they are paid after taking a cut. This could have happened both knowingly (on Garmin's side) and not.

solumos2• 6 years ago

Migrating to backups seems possible. Garmin is pretty complex in that it produces hardware and software across a few verticals, but I don't think there's anything that makes them particularly unique in the way they'd handle backups/failover.

I think it's also possible that Garmin proactively pulled the plug on their public-facing services in order to mitigate the spread of the attack. It would be _really_ bad if the attackers could make the hop from Garmin's web services to consumer devices.

adwww• 6 years ago

...or avionics systems for that matter!

sharken• 6 years ago

According to Symantec attackers first gain entry and then explores the network. This process will take anything from days to weeks.

By the time the encryption begins they have explored every way possible into critical systems.

Preventing the second stage attack is what Symantec has been successful in preventing, this video gives an insight into how that works

https://youtu.be/p1KJiv-RjMU

sh-run• 6 years ago

I'd be curious to know what all was actually impacted by the ransomware. It sounds like they shutdown all their services in order to assess the damage.

Maybe this only affected their corporate infrastructure or manufacturing infrastructure. Looking through my connect account I don't see any missing data that would point to a backup old enough to not be encrypted. My watch does store some information offline so it could be that any gaps have already been filled in or it could be that connect was encrypted and has since been decrypted.

prh8• 6 years ago

Yeah it's just a very poor article all around. Literally nothing to support the title of the entire article.

stainforth• 6 years ago

The NSA most certainly has the keys, and inshallah I hope that's the case - our nerds better be better than their nerds. I just think they don't want make our defensive capabilities public. But the many billions per year going to NSA better show some results. Maybe our great Chamber of Commerce can insist on making the NSA's great work and capability available to the Western market forces so key to the current prosperity we all enjoy.

Waterluvian• 6 years ago

What supports any of these claims? What should I google to understand why the NSA has the keys?

jlgaddis• 6 years ago

Assuming the ransomers aren't completely incompetent and are using 256-bit or even 128-bit AES, why would you assume that "the NSA most certainly has the keys"?

They might be good but they aren't good enough to randomly crack AES.

_salmon• 6 years ago

There's nothing definitive that says they paid the ransom or obtained the decryption key from the attackers. Rumors on Twitter say that they're rebuilding services from backups and slowly getting things back online

solumos2• 6 years ago

I can imagine it's possible that a 1-week outage + cyber risk insurance claim + rebuilding from backups could net out to less than $10M.

nomdep2• 6 years ago

It doesn't matter. Unless a live is at risk, you never ever pay ransoms, or others will try again.

hangonhn• 6 years ago

I wonder if going after such a well known target was a mistake since once the news leaked out it put Garmin in a position where it would be much harder for them to pay the ransom. I wonder if their chances of success are higher by going after a larger number of lesser known and less valuable targets who may not garner the attention nor have the IT staff to deal with the issue.

interestica3• 6 years ago

But then you're not going to get as high of a payout? Maybe this math works, or maybe it's a feeler to figure out where the line is.

loa_in_• 6 years ago

Maybe the smaller targets were already tried but didn't make the news

sukilot5• 6 years ago

They go after everyone.

SimonPStevens• 6 years ago

This title is overly misleading. There is no evidence presented in the article to even suggest they paid the ransom. And Garmin declined to comment.

It's possible they paid, but it's also possible they are just restoring backups.

beloch• 6 years ago

If they didn't pay off the hackers and are recovering on their own, it would be in Garmin's best interests to issue a public statement explicitly saying so. Failing to do so may make them a target for other hacker groups. Their vulnerability is now proven and their willingness to pay strongly suggested.

SkyBelow2• 6 years ago

Even if they did pay, wouldn't it still be better to say they were restoring from backups? Makes them look far less vulnerable to the attack and they can likely wrap it with enough PR speak to not be technically lying. Arguably about as morally troublesome of an act as paying for the ransom.

bitexploder• 6 years ago

Well, if they didn’t have good DR before, you can bet they will now. An ounce of DR planning is worth a pound of the ransomware cure :)

NotSammyHagar4• 6 years ago

I'm certain they paid, that's why they are making ambiguous statements. I hope they prosecute them for this payment. An indirect payment is still a criminal action in my opinion. If the mafia said they'd burn their building down or kill their ceo or whatever, and they paid them off through some abstract indirect transaction it would still be wrong.

This should make them a direct target now, they will pay you off. Among many many reasons allowing payments like this will just encourage these criminals to keep doing this bullshit.

sukilot5• 6 years ago

I don't want to live in a country where the government prosecutes victims of crimes instead doing its primary duty of national defense against foreign attackers.

rodgerd• 6 years ago

I am a lot more interested in the answers to questions like:

1. Why was there lateral spread across low-criticality devices fitness devices and avionics devices?

2. Why was there lateral spread across manufacturing, customer support, and PII regions?

3. What assurances are there that health information wasn't leaked?

4. What's the general security position around avionics, marine, and health data at Garmin?

Spooky23• 6 years ago

Segmentation is expensive and slows stuff down. Businesses are bad at segmenting risk.

I'd expect the avionics and marine stuff to be a little better due to compliance requirements.

dylan604• 6 years ago

I don't know. It seems like whenever a company needs to have data shared, it by default is siloed. Yet when a company needs siloed/segmented verticals, they are shared with no boundaries. You rarely hear about companies that have done it correctly, yet everyone has worked for a company that does it badly.

drtillberg• 6 years ago

You want to know if Garmin pushed malware/ransomware via its app onto 1 million smartphones? The apps seem to have been last updated July 21, and Garmin's systems were locked July 23, so.... ?

ideals• 6 years ago

A few people have commented on the logistics of paying a large Bitcoin ransom which can entail hiring a 3rd party to pay it.

Could an independent party buy the decryption keys from the ransomware party for their asking price then attempt to resell this to Garmin (or other party) for more money?

Of course it's a bit game theory because you're depending on the target to pay and the ransomware attacker to not relinquish and resell the key to anyone else including the target.

Ignore the legality of it all else it's not very interesting to think about.

usrusr4• 6 years ago

More likely scenario: the attackers demand 10 mil knowing that 10 would be an unlikely best case scenario and a more likely outcome would be something like 2 mil, passed on on exchange for the keys by a cooperating fake computer forensics firm that claims to be able to restore the data without paying the attackers. For only 3 mil, an absolute bargain. The victim would pay the 3 mil, either falling for the show or claiming to be falling for the show.

exabrial• 6 years ago

I should be able to see all of my locally recorded stuff without the cloud.

I was happy that basic functions of my Garmin Venu continued to work. But some stuff should be cached, or stuff that hasn't been sync'd should be available locally.

zwaps• 6 years ago

I want to say that previous versions of Garmin connect did have the data locally, such that you could see your runs or activities without being connected to the Garmin services.

The present version of Garmin connect does nothing if you are not connected to Garmin servers. E.g. you can't see your activities, your data or anything else.

When this change occurred, I remember that it annoyed me greatly. Why not have some local data cached on your phone? Other apps seem to manage that no problem. If you'd have no internet access, you could at least still use the app to see your activities and sync them later. This seems so obvious to me that I have trouble understanding why they chose the current route.

Of course, it's still not a total disaster. Garmin devices still work and track, you can still view the data on them, and they usually plug in as a USB drive anywhere so you can upload the data manually.

Still, for smartwatch users, this could have been a really minor inconvenience rather than what it is now.

jrockway• 6 years ago

Has there been any discussion about the technical details of the attack? I am having a hard time imagining how a compromise of a workstation could result in the entire company -- their own apps, their call center -- going down for days. I can see how malware could break production severely ("kubectl delete deployments" from a trusted workstation). I can see how malware can wipe out your desktop. I can see how malware could f your cloud infrastructure account. But I'm not drawing the line to "we can't build a new release and deploy it on another provider" or "we can't buy an emergency Dialpad account to start taking calls from customers".

My guess is this: two separate attacks occurred. The first attack involved compromising production, and installed a scheduled job that, at a certain time, would delete all database backups and code repositories, deschedule all workloads, delete all DNS records, etc. The next attack involves the fact that all source code is on managed workstations, so they compromised the IT management system to push malware to every machine globally at the exact same time that would destroy all git repositories (etc.) on the workstations. The result was that when the scheduled time occurred, production would crash and there would be no backups. (They must have wiped all the tapes at their offsite backup facility, too. I guess anything can be done for a price!)

To me, this sounds too complicated to even be feasible. I am still impressed when I edit some manifest with a new version number that 90% of the time that code eventually starts running. Being able to orchestrate a multiday outage just seems amazing to me, and that you'd make a lot more money being a cloud provider than a cybercriminal.

The other thought I had was that maybe they just kept thinking "we're so close to getting it back" for three days, rather than saying "everything is lost, revert to backups".

james412• 6 years ago

I am having a hard time imagining how a compromise of a workstation could result in the entire company -- their own apps, their call center -- going down for days

Can't guess at specifics, but if it's a Windows network, I would be utterly unsurprised if all users had excess permissions to shared drives

Many Windows networks just have a giant X: everyone can write to, and it's been like that forever, and it's so deeply baked into everyone's workflow that it never gets fixed

EvanAnderson• 6 years ago

I would presume that the attacker was able to obtain Domain Admin / Enterprise Admin rights before they deployed the payload, then they just steamrolled over everything.

The one of these that I got called-in to clean up after literally had a batch file on Domain Controllers w/ a text file of computer names for a FOR loop launching the malware on computer-after-computer with "psexec". It was decidedly non-sophisticated. The attacker compromised a Domain Admin account and then they were set.

stefan_• 6 years ago

Is it common practice to have the servers running your production (not in the manufacturing sense) cloud services join the AD domain that has your office staff in it? Why? That doesn't even make any sense from a convenience PoV.

It just seems like an unfathomable level of incompetence required to go from compromising some random Windows workstation all across the hardware that runs your app services. And lest we forget: a ransomware attack is always also a massive data loss attack. Garmin better get to work complying with the law and notifying impacted customers (all of them?).

bentcorner• 6 years ago

Many Windows networks just have a giant X: everyone can write to, and it's been like that forever, and it's so deeply baked into everyone's workflow that it never gets fixed

I've seen this too, and you need to be vigilant with what accesses these kinds of resources (basically anybody with write access to these shares also has execute access to any accounts executing from that share).

interestica3• 6 years ago

The impression I got was that the call centre/apps were taken down as preventative measure by their own IT dept. It was probably best for a PR standpoint to keep the call centre silent rather than having a defacto-inoperable call centre inundated with calls about the broken service.

kochthesecond2• 6 years ago

I am also having a hard time with this.

Taking all our services down this hard would require enormous efforts in coordination, potentially months of preparation to make sure it would execute satisfactory.

I think occam must be at work here. There must be some simpler reason why this attack is such a disaster.

NotSammyHagar4• 6 years ago

I'm quite surprised that people seem kind of ok with the idea of ransomware. It's a horrible, criminal corrupt practice and it's destructive to pay or participate in anything to do with this.

bitxbitxbitcoin• 6 years ago

I think the kind of ok feel is from the "they should have had backups, that'll teach 'em" crowd.

interestica3• 6 years ago

Smartwatch maker Garmin has obtained the decryption key to recover its computer files from a ransomware attack last Thursday, Sky News has learned.

Is this really the aspect of their business that they're most known for now? I still think of them as a GPS/Geolocation device company.

thelean12• 6 years ago

GPS smart watches are probably their most successful consumer product currently. If you glance at their website you might think that's all that they do.

usrusr4• 6 years ago

It's their absolute boom segment right now, dwarfing the revenue of all others. Somehow the Apple watch made a lot of people who'd rather wear a Garmin suddenly think that it's perfectly fine to wear an absurdly expensive GPS watch. Garmin has succeeded in establishing a price range where the Apple offering would barely make the upper third.

aeyes• 6 years ago

They and many competitors offer models in every price range, starting at 50$. Of course they will also offer very high end devices with features you won't find on an Apple watch.

I'm pretty sure the 200$ model has features that Apple doesn't have. One is primarily a lifestyle product and the other is primarily focused towards athletes. Both brands overlap with some products but I wouldn't say they found a way to really get their foot into others' market.

glenngillen• 6 years ago

I feel seen by this comment! TBF, I already had a Garmin GPS watch that I bought circa 2006 (one of their first I believe) for tracking my runs. When it came time to upgrade I compared it to the Apple watch. And you're right. I definitely decided I'd much rather spend that much money on something with a 12yr upgrade cycle vs the 2-4 year cycle on many of my Apple devices.

What I've found most surprising is I have young children, and having a Garmin activity tracker watch (seems to be not much more than a step counter) has become the thing every 6yo is expected to have these days. We've avoided it so far, but from speaking to parents with children at neighboring schools they're nearly ubiquitous in the youngest year levels now.

verytrivial• 6 years ago

For the vast majority of users Garmin have ZERO liability re data retention. They could just say WHOOPS! and zero all accounts and require everyone to resync. And I would have respected them for that as they've now sent $10M to these assailants to increase the sophistication of their attacks and retain/lure/entrap more skilled developers. But then I'm a bit of a moral absolutist.

If their financial records were all toast too I wonder what the fines would have been ...

cafebabbe• 6 years ago

brand reputation is a heck of a liability

kochthesecond2• 6 years ago

Yeah, Id also accept all my data zeroed instead of financing hackers.

It still puzzles me greatly how this ransomware has such a huge impact. How Does it allow hacking and encrypting the db servers?

concerto• 6 years ago

I was confused by the use of "sanctioned" in the byline. They meant it mean "had sanctions imposed", but I understood it as "given permission" which set the article in a completely different tone. What an odd word.

bobbylarrybobby• 6 years ago

More fun examples here:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Auto-antonym?wprov=sfti1

theli0nheart• 6 years ago

I had the same reaction. "Sanctioned by" would be the correct usage here.

JohnTClark• 6 years ago

Does US or other western country ever retaliate? It seams to me that Russia and China keep attacking as and we do nothing. Was vkontakte ever taken down? What would happen if an US hacker group "independent" of NSA would attack a Russian company?

Garmin obtains decryption key after ransomware attack

Related Stories