This discussion has been locked.

You can no longer post new replies to this discussion. If you have a question you can start a new discussion

connect.garmin.com compromised? why is sd card messed up after trying manual upload?

Former Member over 12 years ago

Hi there,

the day before yesterday I tried to do a manual upload of an activity from my sd card like I am used to for years. So I logged into connect.garmin.com and browsed to the file. Because the upload took ages, I made a refresh in the browser after having waited for some 15 minutes without any apparent progress. As there was still not the new activity in the list, I tried to try a second time. However, to my amazement the file was gone on the sd card. Looking at the sd card with the windows file explorer, I noticed that the most recent activity .fit files were missing. After a while the entire Garmin folder on the sd card was messed up such that the windows file explorer showed only garbage. See attachment. It is not any kind of encryption but the file system is messed up. The Window file explorer cannot handle the file, giving error message of invalid records, and Ubuntu linux cannot read the superblock either. (Encryption may come to pass in addition, who knows.)

I did a routine security scan last week, booting of a cd, and I did another after the incident. No viruses or trojan discovered on my computer. I am a wary person anyway so slim chances that I have caught malware.

So what happened? Why is the sd card messed up while everything else kept working fine and security scans did not discover anything? Searches on the internet did not yield any reports regarding malware that is affecting sd cards only. The most likely explanation at this moment is that the website connect.garmin.com had/has been compromised. Anyone around here with similar experience? Any Garmin technician to tell what may happen while uploading manually from an sd card?

Any advice, answers or hints highly appreciated.

regards, Rrr

Windows 8, Firefox 21, sd card plugged into my computer

0 ExperimentalRunner over 12 years ago

I have seen the data become corrupted on many types of removable media (USB drives, CF cards, SD cards). This usually occurs if the media is removed without gracefully dismounting the storage volume, e.g. by ejecting the device within the operating system. (I just had this happen to a microSD card I was using to move ebooks between my PC and my e-reader.) A security scan will look for malware, but will not check the for integrity of data. Your best course of action is to remove whatever files you can from the card and re-format it.

(Not a Garmin technician, but I've got 20+ years in IT infrastructure/data management)

0 Former Member over 12 years ago

connect.garmin.com compromised? why is sd card messed up after trying manual upload?

Hi Brian,

thx for your reply. Yep, this is what technicians usually suspect. I would have asked the exactly same question. However, I did not remove the SD card while it had been mounted. Rather, I unplugged the card from a properly turned off Garmin Edge 800 and plugged it into my computer. The card was properly mounted; I could read the listing in Windows 8 file explorer; I selected one file of roughly 425kb from the manual upload in FireFox 21 and waited. As I wrote, after some 15min waiting for the upload to finish, I hit F5 in FireFox to refresh the page, after that piece by piece the files started to disappear. The listing in the file explorer kept changing up to what you see in my screenshots. So in addition to my not having ungracefully dismounted the SD card, it also was not a sudden change but a process that I witnessed in front of my eyes. So I guess it is also no case of ungracefully dismounting the SD card by Windows 8 or something else.

Being a technicians in the field myself for 10+yrs, I'll plan on running a potent data recovery tool and I am anxious to see what its result are going to be. (Luckily I am under no pressure of restoring a system backup as I am avid at backing up my code and I do all sensitive data processing booted off a Linux CD. So I can wait and see what the security news over the next few months turn up--or what my data recovery runs turns up.) After all, I want to learn the root cause for my professional honor.

re, Rrr

PS. There are not files as of now that I could remove as the file explorer only returns invalid file record messages. (Which I think I mentioned already.)

I have seen the data become corrupted on many types of removable media (USB drives, CF cards, SD cards). This usually occurs if the media is removed without gracefully dismounting the storage volume, e.g. by ejecting the device within the operating system. (I just had this happen to a microSD card I was using to move ebooks between my PC and my e-reader.) A security scan will look for malware, but will not check the for integrity of data. Your best course of action is to remove whatever files you can from the card and re-format it.

(Not a Garmin technician, but I've got 20+ years in IT infrastructure/data management)

0 ExperimentalRunner over 12 years ago

Sounds like a plan. Let us know how everything turns out. BTW, I saw a couple of directories and the Germany1.img file in the screenshot, so I assumed that there were intact files that could be recovered. I don't doubt that you removed the card carefully from your Edge; Windows 8 may have been the culprit, i.e. not dismounting the volume properly. It was my OS, not my ereader, that corrupted my microSD card, even though it said that it was safe to remove the device. I hope everything works out for you.

0 Former Member over 12 years ago

Yep, I did not take a closer look. Only the map of Germany seems to have remained intact. Other maps of similar size did not as did all the other directories and 30+ .fit files. Even same for content in the Bkp directory. So directories on first level did survive for sure. Btw, what's your OS?

0 ExperimentalRunner over 12 years ago

I have 3 Windows machines with Training Center, the Communicator plug-in and the latest USB drivers, running XP Professional, Vista Home Premium and 7 Enterprise. All machines are 32 bit. I mainly use Linux, but Garmin won't go there. That being said, I have uploaded data from my 305 to pyTraining on Ubuntu and it worked just fine.