GREENSBORO, N.C. — Most things in life include a computer. But right now, car dealerships across the U.S. are doing all their sales and tracking their parts by hand. That's right, with pen and paper the old-school way. Back-to-back cyberattacks last week are the cause.
"I think what's crazy about this breach is the magnitude. We've had major breaches for this to be going on for this long and this type of outage where people have been using pen and pencil for almost a week now, is crazy," said Joseph Steinberg, Cyber Security expert.
CDK Global is an auto dealer software company. Dealers use this software to calculate prices, sell cars, print out the forms, as well as for locating parts in their service departments.
As the website confirms, they provide service for nearly 15,000 car dealers across the country, that's about half the car dealerships in the US. It's crazy to think half of all dealerships in the US cannot use their systems right now.
2 Wants To Know made calls to several local dealerships and was told over the phone that they were doing all the paperwork for sales and service by hand. It's slow going, but they are serving customers. That's not what's happening everywhere. In some areas, dealers are simply closing their doors. The computer system outage was making it too difficult and too slow to do business.
Cyber Security experts say this should be a warning for our government when it comes to supply chain and business.
"This is really a revelation about how many industries are vulnerable to a cyber attack. What if this happened at the same time as five other industries and now you have millions of Americans using pen and paper to try to keep their business processes going, that could cause a panic," said Steinberg.
If you're going to a dealer to get service done or buying a car, you'll want to call the dealership so you'll know what to expect.