Except translation, this story has not been edited by achinews staff and is published from a syndicated feed.
NEW YORK –
Car dealers across North America have faced major disruptions this week.
CDK Global, a company that provides software for thousands of car dealers in the US and Canada, was hit by back-to-back cyber attacks on Wednesday. That led to an outage that continued to affect many of their operations on Friday.
For would-be car buyers, that could mean delays at dealers or hand-written vehicle orders, with no immediate end in sight. Here’s what you need to know.
What is CDK Global?
CDK Global is a major player in the car dealership industry. The company, based just outside of Chicago in Hoffman Estates, Illinois, provides software technology to dealers that helps with day-to-day operations – such as facilitating vehicle sales, financing, insurance and repairs.
CDK serves more than 15,000 retail locations throughout North America, according to the company. It was not immediately clear whether all these locations were affected by this week’s cyber attacks.
What happened this week?
CDK is “investigating a cyber incident” and the company shut down all of its systems out of an abundance of caution, spokeswoman Lisa Finney said Wednesday.
CDK conducted “extensive testing,” consulted with third-party experts, and restored its core DMS and Digital Retail solutions by afternoon, Finney said in a prepared statement.
CDK experienced another “cyber incident” Wednesday night, Finney said in an update the following day. “We remain vigilant in our efforts to restore our services and get our dealers back to business as usual as soon as possible,” he said.
When that will be is still unknown. As of Friday morning, a recorded message from CDK on a hotline detailing updates for its customers said “we do not have an estimated time frame for a resolution – and therefore our dealer systems will be unavailable, likely for several day.” Customer care support channels are also unavailable, he said.
The message added that the company is aware of “bad actors” pretending to be members or connected to CDK to try to gain access to the system by contacting customers. He urged employers to be wary of any phishing attempt.
Are affected dealerships still selling cars?
Several major auto companies – including Stellantis, Ford and BMW – confirmed to The Associated Press on Friday that the CDK outage has affected some of their dealers, but that sales operations are continuing.
In light of the ongoing situation, a spokesperson for Stellantis said that many dealerships have switched to manual processes to serve customers. That includes writing orders by hand.
A Ford spokesman said the outage could cause “some delay and inconvenience to some dealers and to some customers.” However, many Ford and Lincoln customers still receive sales and service support through alternative routes that are used at dealerships.
With many details of the cyber attacks still unknown, customer privacy is also top of mind – especially without much information about what information may have been compromised this week.
In a statement sent to the AP on Friday, Mike Stanton, president and CEO of the National Automobile Dealers Association, said that “dealers are very committed to protecting their customer information and are actively seeking information from CDK to determine the nature and scope of the cyber. incident so they can respond appropriately.”
(Except translation, this story has not been edited by achinews staff and is published from a syndicated feed.)
source link https://www.ctvnews.ca/business/car-dealerships-in-canada-u-s-disrupted-by-multi-day-outage-after-cyberattacks-1.6936213
