Car dealership software-as-a-service provider CDK Global was recently hit by a massive cyberattack, causing the company to shut down its systems and leaving clients unable to operate business as normal.
The company provides clients in the auto industry a SaaS platform to handle all aspects of a car dealership’s operation from CRM, financing, and payroll to support and service, inventory, and back office operations. The company is used by over 15K car dealerships in North America and has thousands of employees across the country. In order to use the services, dealerships configure an always-on VPN to the data centers which allows their locally installed applications to access the platform.
The recent cyberattack caused CDK Global to shut down its IT systems, phones, and applications to prevent the spread of the attack. With the two data centers offline, there was widespread disruption among car dealerships using their platform. While CDK has not shared much, employees at dealerships say they’ve been sent an email warning about the incident, and the company is assessing the overall impact with no ETA. There is an additional rumor that the company suffered a ransomware attack impacting its backups, but this information has not been independently confirmed.
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