6/20/24

Cyberattack hits car dealerships across the U.S.
Auto retailers across the U.S. and Canada face potentially days of outages due to back-to-back cyberattacks this week on CDK Global, a software provider with 15,000 car dealerships in North America, per Automotive News.

Why it matters: Cybersecurity has a domino effect problem, as hundreds of organizations this year face service disruptions due to a singular attack on a third-party vendor, Axios Codebook author Sam Sabin notes.

•Car dealerships across the U.S. reverted to using pen and paper to process auto repairs and new vehicle sales this week as CDK worked to bring its systems back online following the attacks that began on Wednesday.

Driving the news: CDK shut down its systems as it investigated the first "cyber incident," according to a statement company spokesperson Lisa Finney shared with Axios via email on Thursday night.

The company's core dealership management system and Digital Retailing solutions were restored on Wednesday afternoon, but the statement said late in the evening CDK "experienced an additional cyber incident" and "proactively shut down" most of its systems.

State of play: BMW North America told Reuters the CDK outage was "impacting automotive dealerships across the U.S. and Canada, including a portion of BMW Group dealers."

• Companies including Kia, Toyota and Stellantis, which makes Jeep and Dodge vehicles, had helped with ways to assist in serving customers during the CDK outage and Ford said it's been "able to receive sales and service support due to alternative processes available to our dealers," per CNN.