Cyberattacks Stall Car Dealerships: Dealers React To 'Inexcusable' Outages With No End In Sight

Cyberattacks have targeted car dealerships, causing widespread outages in the latest test of cybersecurity’s might.

What Happened: Approximately 15,000 car dealerships throughout the U.S. that use CDK Global, a private software company, had their services disrupted following cyberattacks on CDK Global’s platform on Wednesday.

According to Axios, CDK told customers on Thursday that it did “not have an estimated time frame for resolution and therefore our dealers’ systems will not be available likely for several days.”

Dealers are now using pen and paper rather than computer systems for several functions. Some routine actions, such as title work, cannot be done amid the outage.

Dealers React: Several dealership employees voiced displeasure with the breach and ongoing loss of service.

“We’re in the summer months,” Ourisman Auto Group executive Jeff Ramsey told ABC7 News. “This is where we need systems functioning.”

Dealership employees reacted to the outage in a Reddit thread.

“This is crazy, we’re writing RO’s [repair orders] by hand, we can’t look up parts or order parts, I’m not getting paid on vehicles I work on. Everything runs through CDK,” one user commented.

“I work at a Ford dealership in MD and we've been down just as long as everyone else. Luckily for I'm in training until the 28th… I hope they [CDK] fail and the dealerships will be forced to get something else. There is no excuse or reason for the constant outages and this is inexcusable,” another user said.

“We are f—ed,” commented a user on another thread. “Every delivery is being rescheduled to a future date.”

Why it Matters: The summer season is among the busiest times of the year for car dealers and continued outages cut into dealers’ profits.

Several other companies have faced similar cyberattacks. Semiconductor company Advanced Micro Devices Inc AMD reported a data breach on Tuesday but later clarified that the attack had no “material impact” on its business.

On June 6, Snowflake Inc SNOW acknowledged unauthorized access to clients’ accounts, affecting customers such as Ticketmaster and Santander Bank.

Closely watched cybersecurity ETFs include the Amplify Cybersecurity ETF HACK and the First Trust NASDAQ Cybersecurity ETF CIBR. At the time of writing, both ETFs have posted losses in the past month.

Also Read: Biden Administration To Ban Sale Of Russia-Linked Kaspersky Software In US Over National Security Concerns: Report

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