In June an extortion group hit CDK Global, the company the provides software for many car dealerships across the United States was hit by cyberattacks. It led to an outage felt by thousands of dealerships, that found they could not perform their daily operations. Several weeks later, dealerships and customers are still feeling the effects.
What is CDK Global
CDK Global is a big player in the auto industry. The Chicago area-based company provides software technology to car dealerships across the country. The software is used for day-to-day operations, including financing, insurance, vehicle sales, and repairs. They work with over 15,000 different dealerships.
What Happened?
On Wednesday June 19th, the company experienced back-to-back cyber-attacks. It prompted CDK to take all of their systems offline. They shut down their systems after the first attack out of an abundance of caution, and then shut them down again after the second attack. According to reports, the initial attack a multi-million dollar ransom from a known criminal hacking group. Although this information has not been confirmed by CDK.
As of July 3rd, they were still working on getting the systems back up and running, but there are still many car dealerships that are not fully up to speed.
Old-School Car Sales
For the dealerships affected, being off-line meant going back to basics. For customers, it means buying a car could take longer than normal. While the attack affected almost all aspects of car sales and service, some of the biggest impacts are in the in-house financing part of the process. Even though service is now back, there pause created a back log of finance applications. If customers have an application through a dealership, they will have to be patient.
More Customer Impacts
One of the extra conveniences provided by CDK was enabling car dealerships to automatically register vehicles with local DMVs. They can file the paperwork right from the dealership and get a license plate. This makes the process easier for the customer, because they don’t have to visit the DMV after the buy a car. Without the proper software, customers who were able to purchase cars, will have to make a trip to the DMV and wait in long lines to register their new car.
The cyberattack and lack of software for a few days is also causing service delays. The car dealerships use the CDK software to schedule service appointments, check their customer’s service histories, and check on parts inventories. Service departments were able to function without the software, but they had to do everything manually and write everything down on paper. Now that everything is back online, they have to go back and manually enter all the information into the system.
What Now
All the systems are back up and running, but CDK is warning their customers to be careful. There may be people posing as CDK affiliates trying to gain access to the system by contacting customers. They are warning people to be careful of attempted phishing.
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