Disruption continues for auto dealerships in wake of cyberattack

Auto dealerships across the country—including some in Baton Rouge—continue to grapple with the effects of an ongoing cyber incident at CDK Global.

Dealerships use CDK Global’s software for essential day-to-day operations like selling and repairing vehicles and tracking inventory. What the company has described as a “ransom event” led to service shutdowns at about 15,000 dealerships nationwide last week.

One local dealership that has been affected by the outage is Mercedes-Benz of Baton Rouge. Nick Pentas, the dealership’s general manager and co-owner, says that while CDK Global claims to have restored service to a small group of dealerships, his dealership was not one of them.

Pentas tells Daily Report that his staff has had to revert to Excel spreadsheets and pen and paper to carry out many of their duties, and he says that even when CDK Global gives the green light to resume use of its software, his dealer group will tread carefully.

“Even when they do restore service, we want to be abundantly cautious,” Pentas says. “We have eight dealerships in our dealer group and we have some IT professionals who are going to scrub everything to make sure we’re secure before we go back online.”

Pentas says he does see a light at the end of the tunnel; he’s hopeful that the issue will be resolved within the next five to seven business days. As Bloomberg reports, CDK Global is planning to pay tens of millions of dollars in ransom to the group behind the attack.

As to whether his dealership will continue to use CDK Global’s software once the dust has settled, Pentas says he’s not ready to make any grand declarations but that his dealer group will consider its options at an upcoming summit.

“We’re going to discuss backups and redundancy, but that doesn’t necessarily mean we’re going to switch from CDK,” he says. “There are a few other options out there that we’ve explored in the past, though, so it wouldn’t be [out of the question] to reconsider them because of this.”

Besides the inconveniences inherent to the manual processing of information, Pentas says his dealership has also likely taken a hit to its bottom line as a result of the outage—though it’s too early to tell to what extent.

“We do presume that there will be some financial loss,” he says. “We won’t know how to compute that until we’re back online.”

Take Our Poll