SW17LS

This is interesting. As many of you know I am in the middle of negotiating a car, and their system is down and they have been calculating things longhand, it takes a long time between backs and forths, and he let me go home the other day and wait for numbers which I thought was unusual. I thought it was just that dealer's system, but its not! This is why, the system most car dealers in the country use is the victim of cyberattack and has been down-

https://apnews.com/article/car-deale...b33cdc9f49feba

Its impacted both sales and service, I had to sign a paper handrwritten intake when I dropped my car off for service, the loaner agreement was all done on paper etc. What a nightmare!

I always dump the numbers I am given into a lease calculator, and I thought it was odd they came out to exactly what I had been quoted. Its usually a little off just because the dollars and cents aren't exact. Its dead on to the dollar. They must be using the same consumer calculator!

bitkahuna

iTrader: (20)

yes this is a huge problem for car dealers. of course these kind of attacks are hitting businesses and governments (and consumers) of all sizes. billions are being lost in blackmail, ransoms, lost productivity, and rebuilding IT systems. with AI this is going to get MUCH worse.

SW17LS

My previous company had a ransom attack like this after I left, it impacted their whole platform agents use to write contracts etc. They told them to shove it and just rebuilt everything from scratch...

I am less frustrated with the dealer now. This whole process has been slow and painful and this explains it. Like even securing the car yesterday was an ordeal, thats because somebody had to go out and set eyes on it to know it was there.

Striker223

This is one reason it's always a good idea to have redundancy of some type IMO, integrated systems and services are great but it ties so much to external systems it can cripple everything. Like the AWS issues a few years back and as said it will just get worse going forward

BlueIS05

I should be taking delivery of my LC soon. Dealer seems to think we can transact with no issues so we’ll see. Until the car is in my possession, it ain’t done!

SW17LS

Thats my opinion too! I'm also told we can transact. We'll see.

tex2670

There are some things you can't have redundancy on tho - it's cost prohibitive. Like if you use Microsoft Office 365 for your office software, and there's some regional or nationwide outage, you can't just have a second service for email and document production ready to go. My understanding is that CDK is a cloud service that car dealers use for critical functions to operate their business, similar to Microsoft Office.

Striker223

Sure you can, have a contingency plan to use some other service and practice doing so so that if something happens you aren't totally frozen. Same things the dealers are currently doing with manual entry etc but if there is a plan in place it's not as disruptive

Margate330

I'm not sure what a CDK platform is so I'll have to look that one up.

There's always a small percentage in every society that will do stuff like ransom ware. They clearly have the skill to earn a living but they choose to be a cockroach instead. It's sad

GS69

In the process of trying to a buy a new vehicle & a dealership will not even talk #s bc the system is down. They claim that they have no idea what price they can sell the vehicle for (other than MSRP) until it is back up.

SW17LS

I'm buying one right now, they CAN do it its just very painful. Its like buying a car in 1995. I just signed the purchase order and its all handwritten onto an old form from the 90s. What a nightmare.

tex2670

Kudos to your dealer for never throwing out that stock of blank forms.....

Margate330

I still have my dot matrix printer just in case.


tex2670

Perhaps. But considering it took over 6 weeks to migrate all of our data when my firm signed up with a new document management system provider, if they go off line, I don't see how we could just "use some other service". That's like saying if your cable goes out, just plan to use FIOS. Yes companies need disaster recovery plans, but if these services are data driven, a back up service needs access to the data.

tex2670

With tractor feed paper? or plain?