7:35 am, June 26, 2024
Car dealers hit by the cyber-attack on CDK Global’s dealer management system software probably won’t be able to get back to normal before the end of June.
Dealerships across North America have had to revert to using pen and paper to process sales and repairs since CDK’s platform was targeted last week by cyber-criminals – believed to be based in eastern Europe – who demanded a ransom from the software company.
CDK agreed to pay the hackers tens of millions of dollars, according to a report, and now Reuters reports that it has seen a company memo in which CDK Global tells car dealers that it doesn’t think its dealer management software will be restored for all of them before June 30.
It says in the memo that they should make alternative arrangements for their month-end financial processes.
More than 15,000 car dealerships across the pond use CDK Global software.
Meanwhile, in an interview with Automotive News, Brian MacDonald, who is CDK Global’s chief executive, said he was in talks with ‘many dealers, OEMs and partners directly’ and that the company was ‘working around the clock with leading third-party experts to get dealers back to business as usual and as quickly as possible’.
Some dealerships have had to go back to using pen and paper to get things done, and according to a source the attack is said to have affected roughly half of Volkswagen dealers and some three-fifths of Audi dealerships.
Hyundai, Toyota and Honda are monitoring things, with Honda saying it had told dealers affected by the hack to use other processes and tools so that they can carry on business while CDK’s systems are offline.
