CDK Global, a company that provides software for thousands of auto dealers in the U.S. and Canada, was hit by back-to-back cyberattacks Wednesday. That led to an outage that has continued to impact operations.
For prospective car buyers, that’s meant delays at dealerships or vehicle orders written up by hand. There’s no immediate end in sight, but CDK says it expects the restoration process to take “several days” to complete.
This will probably be your standard someone’s exposed password compromised CDK’s network but bare in mind the staffing situation at a car dealership. For the most part you have the regular mix of personalities and capabilities that you see at any business. Except a car dealership has one dept that has a higher number than normal of clueless posers. The sales staff. Considering my experience doing IT work for a dealerships I can tell you the biggest security hole is the sales staff. What a bunch of techless fools. just take this one example.
I installed a mesh wireless system at one dealership in 2012. Did it right with a separate vlan for the guest ssid. I also at the owners request set the qos lower on the guest network to prevent a guest from hogging the bandwidth. I ended up with a loss on the job due to all the complaints from the sales weenies. Here is a sample list of their complaints.
No specifics just nice generalizations and a complete lack of understanding that what they were doing at the time it was slow was important to being able to work the problem. None of them, not one would let me do some tests using their phone. They didn’t want their porn habits to be known I guess.
The situation was always just two things. Half of them were convinced that you never saved the wireless connection since one half wit there said one time the reason why your phone couldn’t connect to WiFi quickly sometimes was that you had too many saved connections. They just used the guest network which was heavily rate limited. They were told this many times but sales staff are not hired for their comprehension skills. Just the ability lie and manipulate in a pleasant way to the customers. Since I was not a customer they were as rude as any group of humans can be.
The other major thing at that time was they all were asshole buddies who had some of the stupidest status one ups. One of them was that they had to have the latest IOS update the day it came out. Of course millions of other people were grabbing the update that day. They just couldn’t comprehend that just having fast internet didn’t guarantee that apple would let them have the update at that speed. I had a iPhone at that time and they would ask how long it took me to get the update and I would just laugh and say I’ll get it in a few weeks after all of you have tested it for apple.
All of the above leads to the ol straw that broke the camels back. I had already lost money on the deal due to all the complaints I had to deal with. One IOS update broke the phones. They called angry that the WiFi broke their iphones. I told them it was the apple update that broke them not the wireless. Apple had already released a fix but these guys insisted I come out there and fix the wireless. I refused saying that it was clearly a issue with apple. The GM there called the police on me accusing me of sabotage/hacking. I get a call from the local PD who I also did work for asking me what was going on. After I got through explaining that they were idiots I called the owner and told him I would be out the next day to remove the equipment and give him a refund for it.
He asked why and I told him what the sales staff were saying and how the GM called the chief of police on me. All due to their stupidity. He told me that it works great for him every time he is there and I wouldn’t hear any more complaints. I later learned he drove from his other dealership two counties over and reamed the sales staff and GM out. Told them that if they had a problem with the WiFi to call him. I did note the next time I was there I only had to deal with the office staff who I had never had any trouble with. The sales staff and the GM made a production number our of ignoring me.