CHARLOTTESVILLE, VA (CVILLE RIGHT NOW) – Local car dealerships are doing business a bit differently after a cyber attack shut down the management software they most prominently use. CDK Global told its car dealership clients Tuesday that the suite of software tools powering their businesses will likely not be fully functional for the remainder of the month after the company was hacked, causing a system-wide outage. The announcement comes one full week after the initial CDK cyberattack, which the company is calling a “ransom event,” crippling 15,000 auto dealers across the U.S.
Carter Myers President and CEO Liza Borches tells Morning News they’ve become adaptation adept through facing myriad challenges from COVID and supply chain shortages over the past few years. She says she cannot speak about statewide or nationwide, but car dealerships across the Charlottesville area have “found ways to create systems and processes down to using Excel spreadsheets to track $12-million in parts across all of our dealerships… we are manually tracking the 3000 new and used vehicles going in and out of our dealerships every single day”.
She says the past experiences have made them “adaptable, resilient, and solutions-focused”, and within 7 days — some within 24 hours — they were able to create systems to continue business. They’ve also worked to ensure the lack of technology they’re temporarily without does not affect the customer experience, which she says ultimately is “human to human”.
Borges says Carter Myers is being very diligent in understanding what’s going on in regard to customer data, though CDK at this time is not sharing a lot of information about it. She says, at this point, CDK’s competitors are not pointing fingers and are shoring up their protocols and learning from the situation as they’re thinking this could have just as well happened to them. Carter Myers is still considering whether to continue with CDK once they’re back up-and-running. She says any change to a CDK competitor is a long, involved transition that could take about a year. So they’re carefully considering the future.
