SOUTHFIELD, Mich. (CBS DETROIT) – a crippling cyber attack on car dealers is getting worse. It has shut down sales, financing and payroll systems.
From sales to accounting, car dealers rely heavily on CDK technology for their daily operations. You may still be able to walk into a dealership with the system offline, but you may not be able to drive away with a new car.
Cybersecurity expert David Derigiotis said about half of all car dealers in the US and Canada are feeling the impact of the CDK outage.
“It allows companies to manage inventory, interact with customers and perform all kinds of back-end processing work. If you can’t do that, the business will come to a standstill, or at least very slowly. That’s what we do. I see here now at car dealerships,” Derigiotis told CBS News Detroit.
Jay Sturtz, general sales manager for Dearborn Village Ford, said they are resorting to old-fashioned pen and paper as they wait for CDK to come back online. The cyber attack especially took a toll on repairs.
“It was difficult, more so in service than in sales. They need this information in CDK. We are going to write repair orders by hand. So we will just have to do that, once the system is working again, we will have to” We will have to enter these into the system.
According to Bloomberg, the group that claimed responsibility for hacking the system is seeking tens of millions of dollars that CDK is willing to pay.
Ford released a statement in response to the disruption:
“There is an industry-wide system outage at some dealers using CDK. This may cause some delays and inconvenience to some dealers and for some customers. However, many Ford and Lincoln customers can receive sales and service support thanks to alternative processes available for Our Dealers While a customer’s local dealer remains the best place for information about their sales and service needs, they can always contact the Ford Customer Relationship Center at 1-800-392-3673.”
Sturtz said CDK Technology is involved in running every single department of Village Ford, from processing sales to repairs to payroll.
As we head into the weekend, there is still no timetable for CDK’s return to online activities. It has been offline for a few days and CDK says it may take several more days before it comes back online.
