I'm going to kick this off. Thanks, everyone, for joining. This is going to be a very great, just jam-packed session. But what we're going to talk about today is we have some really great people here that came on to speak. Everyone that's joining us already at this point, and you've likely seen my barrage of posts and tweets over the last week with what's going on in car business. CDK, and I'll provide some quick context for anyone that is not up to speed, and then we'll kick it off.
But CDK Global, an automotive software provider, got hacked. The first report of the incident was on June 19th last week, about five or six days ago. Now, this is a pretty big deal, because this has pretty much crippled roughly. You can estimate 50% of US car dealerships. So to take a quick step back, the automotive industry between new and used car sales annually is about $1.2 trillion in sales. Obviously, massive, massive vertical. And CDK powers over 50% of auto retailers. So insanely significant amount for a company like that to get hacked and to go down has had massive impacts on our industry thus far.
And we'll talk more about what that means. We have some people around the table here that we're going to share about how the industry is dealing with it and what can happen next. To give a quick timeline for anyone that's not familiar, and I've made this super, super summarized into like six sentences. So I'll kind of run through this really quick. But on June 19th, there was the first report of an incident of CDK being hacked. You may remember that I posted about a week or two ago about a dealer group in the Vegas area that was hacked as well. Again, two separated isolated events.
But it was really on the heels of that. This dealer group has been shut down. And suddenly on June 19, CDK reported that they were hacked and they had to shut down. On June 20th, they announced a second incident. We really don't know at this point if that was actually the first incident and they didn't fully clean it out or whatever is the right technical term for this. But the point is CDK shut down again. And they said that the attack is likely to last a couple of days.
Mind you, at this point dealers were already down. They had no access to their dealership management system. For anyone that's not in the business and you don't know what a DMS is a deal management system, just think of it as the brain of a dealership. It's the brain, it's the heart. You can't operate without it. It's extremely poor or apparently you cannot operate without it, but it's extremely difficult. Anyways, fast forwarding. June 21, CDK Global said that they're preparing to pay, or they were announced that they're preparing to pay millions of dollars to a criminal group based out of Eastern Europe. This was actually reported by Bloomberg.
And then on the 20s, we actually launched here a crowd source best practices, which we publicized, actually pinned it on my profile, just trying to help the industry continue to push forward in light of all the craziness here. It's hard to really explain hidden specific words right now, what it's like operating in the industry and the real data, the impact this is having a hundreds of thousands of employees, but we'll get into that shortly. And lastly, today is Monday and CDK is still not back on. So you still have 50% of US car dealerships right now somewhat crippled, and this is having a big impact.
So what we're going to discuss here today is, like I said, we have many great dealers, experts, cybersecurity experts, we're government and regulatory experts here on the stage. And really my goal is in open forum here where we can chat about how this may have happened, what it means, what it's going to be for the economy, what it means going forward, right? Like outlook for our industry, and how would this one pack the consumer experience in the future, the dealer experience tech, I mean, a lot to cover.
But with that said, I'm going to take a quick pause to bring on another one or two speakers. And I also want to kick it off to start David. David Spiesak, your CEO up here, really appreciate you joining us for context for everyone. David is president and CEO, corrupted with solutions and automotive consultant. David is pretty much a legend car business. David would love to, would love if you can just give us like a quick background yourself and then dive into your, your take of what's happened with CDK and where we're at today right now in the industry.
You'll see, thank you so much for having me on and good to be with everybody. So my name is David Spiesak. I started in the car business. Like most people in this business, I fell into the job. I didn't grow up as a child dreaming that I would be accepted into being a salesperson. I fell into the business. I spent my first 25 years on the retail side. I'm a former dealer myself. I've created technology and I've been doing advisory and consulting services for dealers around the country as well as for some tech providers, vendors to solutions, vendors to dealers around the country. So here's my take.
I'll be as quick as I can. First of all, there's some really important conversations, interestingly, all kinds of conversations, as you know, you'll see that have happened over the last five days, five and a half days. And it makes sense we would have those. But I think that this is going to turn out to be a watershed moment for dealers around the country that while the GLBA has been around, Grand Leach Bily Act forever and the FTC last month massively increased the regulatory requirements, which we'll talk about in a second.
And dealers really have been doing, I think, a lot in order to elevate their security. I think this is going to force everybody to take a hard look, a different look at who they're doing business with. And starting with the DMS platforms, architecture matters. Talk about that momentarily. Your partner's cybersecurity platform matters. And we'll talk about that shortly. But long story boring, as you mentioned, 15,000 CDK dealers have been knocked out. And while their business has been disrupted and interrupted, depending on the store, we've got literally hundreds of thousands of associates that get paid on variable.
So service advisors, finance men, people, technicians, who've all set their business, their income disrupted. So it's been obviously an incredibly challenging situation. How would happen? I don't know that anybody's ever going to tell us. I'm sorry, I just want to ask you a quick question, because I'm going to push it forward to Yara and Melissa. I want to talk about how it happened from the technical perspective. I do want to ask you a quick question though. What are you hearing right now on the ground floors? I'm sure you've spoken with lots of dealers who are crippled right now, handicapped to do this. What are they telling you? Right, the end of the month is nearing, like commissions for employees. There's so many things that happen, and deals should be like, what are you hearing right now from the ground floor?
Number one, there's huge concern from employees understandably so on whether they're going to get paid, how they're going to get paid, how accurate that payroll's going to be, or any of their deals going to end up going into July, which is going to cost them. Many of these employees are living paycheck to paycheck. They're not big companies, they rely on this money. So that's one thing. Second thing, it was a huge wake-up call. They had no idea that something like this could happen. We hear about it, everywhere in the world, there was over 3,000 cyber attacks last year alone. However, to have something to this extent was really truly unimaginable.
I want to shift the conversation to take us back now to the technical side. And we have Yaron Rosen here. He's a CEO of Fuse. He's here on the stage as well. Yaron is a cybersecurity expert. Again, I'm going to save the intro because you can do it better than me. If you could, Yaron, just keep it at 30 seconds about your background, which has been super impressive. And as I read about you, because I'd love to know your take as an expert in cybersecurity. If you can give us a little bit, take us a little bit into the behind the scenes of not only how this may have happened because anything can be hacked, I believe in that. And you could tell me if you disagree, you're the expert on that.
Really, more importantly, if you can take us to the chain of events here, right? They said that there was a second hack that happened, right? Like what's really, from your experience, what do you really think is happening behind the scenes? Communication has been pretty limited. You know, CQ has put out some communications as their dealers, but the CEO hasn't come forward and spoken. There hasn't been any more communication beyond some emails. And maybe their management team having some conversations on the side with other management teams, really tough to know. So again, kind of wanna give you an open floor to introduce yourself and give us a little, you know, your take on what may have happened behind the scenes and what is currently happening right now.
Yeah, thank you, OC. Thank you for having me. I'm good to be here in my background. In short, I'm very, I did the physical operations for about, you know, almost 30 years in the military. And somehow in a magical way, I transferred, transformed into cyberspace and ended up being the chief of the cyber staff and after I retired about seven years ago, I went into the private sector, founded two startups and now in Fuse, which is totally away from cybersecurity. I just wanted to stay away from it for a while. Just another challenge in my life. So that's my journey, basically. Thank you. So can you, can you answer your take?
Yes, can you take us back here, right? Back to the chain of events, right? Doors, CDK had an initial hack, and then a second hack, so they claimed. Now, right, there's this ransom, which according to Bloomberg, to preparing to pay, right? Can you take us a little bit behind the scenes of, what is really happening? What's your perspective? Having seen, having experienced, you know, a lot of this stuff throughout your career, like what do you really think is happening behind the scenes here and how is this chain of events unfolding?
Yeah, you know, for CDK, I can't feel sorry enough for what they're going through. It's terrible. I mean, for the whole company, the CEO, the management, the board, it's a huge, huge lift, a huge challenge. In my view, this is really a moment that all of us should remember. I call it, I think it's nothing less than automotive's software, Black Swan. I think this is a moment that has the whiff of COVID-19. If all of us remember that, you know, it seems like a long time ago, but I think that all of us have to think about what really this means for how we consume vendors and dealers, how we consume software and how we place it inside dealerships.
Right now, what's going on is, I'm guessing, some kind of negotiations. These guys, from what I understand through, these guys are super sophisticated, these groups. It doesn't matter. The name doesn't matter. There are various groups, Eastern Europe, Chinese, North Korean, South America. They're very, very, very bullish. They got inside probably by accessing credentials from someone, whether it's a customer or someone else, which it's called in the industry, it's called spearfishing.
So CDK was probably the target. They were not, it wasn't just a statistic attack. It was, they were going for CDK. It's a huge landscape. They have so many opportunities. And the bigger we are as a company, the bigger our landscape is, and the harder it is to defend, and they chose a huge target and a very lucrative one.
And once they are inside, basically what they do, they do two things actually at once. They do a double extortion tactic. So they lock your computers and you have that famous screen telling you that you are under attack. And then they also probably extracted information. So they hold your data and they lock your hardware, your computers, and basically they shut you down. And now it's the negotiation start.
In that case, usually what happens, there are incident response teams and crisis management teams that come into play. At the size of CDK, I'm guessing this is huge. So the best teams were called in, but there's no, I mean, if the way CDK was organized before this, I mean, it's such a hard hit that it's really hard to do anything than to negotiate and pay eventually. And that's what I'm guessing is happening. In my mind, I'm hearing that they're coming back, but humbly, I don't know how fast they can come back. I mean, this is something that takes weeks. After you get back some of your data or some of the access to your hardware, how do you know what's going on? How do you start? What do you start with? What part of CDK software do you go?
This is in my mind something that will take a while and I'm guessing at least weeks until they restore full operations and the MERSC attack in 2016, this ended up in three weeks of crippling of global commerce. I mean, and this is a huge company, the biggest shipping company in the world, the amount of retailing that goes on on CDK's software is huge in the US. And I think that if you look,
No, no, I was just gonna, I wanted to try me quickly. Okay, so you mentioned from your experience, this could take weeks. You know, I was speaking with someone, one of the top five largest public autographs. And I tweeted this, he mentioned, he said, hey, I forget the exact word, you look through my post, but he said, hey, my management has been, you know, creating plans for weeks, potentially, like, you know, over a month. Now, when I posted this, it got some pushback. People are like, oh, you're spreading negativity, this and that. But I mean, hearing you say that, like, my intent was, obviously, the globe, this is actually what's happening. And, you know, whether you like it or not, there are very sophisticated auto retailers out there that are planning potentially for, you know, weeks of being shut down.
And just hearing you say this, do you think that CDK telling the world now that they are, you know, hopeful that, you know, they're days away from reigniting their systems here, especially their, you know, their DMS, which we described earlier, this is like the brains of the dealership. Do you think that that's wishful thinking at this point? Like, you think it's realistic, or do you think that we're unlikely to see the DMS, you know, a restoration anytime soon? Like, how do you feel about that? What do you think?
Really humbly from my experience, a hack this size takes weeks to recover from. I just can't believe, you know, that it will come back in days. I think it's wishful thinking. And again, as much as my heart goes out to the CDK guys, I really, I know how this looks like from the inside. It is hell. It is really something you do not want to happen to you, to yourself or to your company or to your friends. It is really heavy, heavy lift. And it takes so much time to clear, you know, the areas that you can run off and really promise your customers, okay guys, now we are safe. Hey, 50%, 15,000 dealerships just got hit. Now you're telling me what? After one week, just go back to normal.
Again, that's why I say it has the whiff of COVID-19 because I remember myself at a board meeting talking about something happening in China. And some people just said, yeah, you know, we'll go back flying in about a month or two, don't worry. And some people were saying, guys, this is something physical. It's going to change the way we do business. And we all know how it ended up. Now it doesn't matter if it's exactly that or anywhere in the middle. What I think the point is what we take from this event. And the point is what needs to change is the grand architecture and how dealerships organize, build a much safer architecture of how they consume the parts that power the dealership.
So if I am a dealer and I have my CRM and I have the in-store, numerous software systems, only if you're taking Fuse, you can do it with one. And then you have the DMS, the cash register, which is your way to take money from someone that is inside your dealership and wants to go home with a car. What does it rely on? On the CRM? No. Does it rely on the DMS? No, taking money, think about restaurant, you have eaten your dinner and you're at the cashier and the cashier is not working. Who cares, does the customer care about the DMS, about how the brain of the dealership works? The customer doesn't care. Does it care about the CRM? No, the customer doesn't care. The customer wants to step out of the dealership. So what we need to create is an architecture that has three separate, isolated parts and there cannot be interconnected. They cannot be interconnected.
Do you need the CRM? You need the DMS and you need a point of sale system, a deal, cash register in the middle, which is different from the first two. That is the grand architecture. And there are of course many things that you can do in the middle to secure yourself. That's the grand architecture. Under additional to that, of course from a cybersecurity perspective, if you're a small dealer or a medium dealer or a large dealer group, it's very different how you deal with such threats. I would ask here, I wish I could do a voting here, but imagine if I would ask here the audience, how many people have a chief information security officer in their dealership group? Like what is the size of dealer that above it, you should have a chief information security officer. And if you're small, of course you don't have one. So do you work with an MSSP, a managed security service provider? You can't do this alone. Cybersecurity is a group, you know, as a team sports. You have to work with someone. Get help.
Again, process people and technology, the blend between these three process, being ready for incident response, people, what do you do? How do you get help? How do you train? Do you have a CISO and tech? I can go on and on on that. We can speak about that later. I agree wholeheartedly with Yaren. It would be so outrageous to bring a system the size of CDK up in a matter of days. You remember when that attack first happened and it was first revealed, first announced? And then we weren't told at that point that it was an Eastern European group or it was ransomware, just that the system had a cyber incident, a cyber incident for those in the car business. Here's the equivalent of a check engine light. A check engine light, I mean, you didn't do a good job putting your gas cap on or a convenient issue that's gonna take your car down for a while. It's a huge bandwidth, same thing here. So I think describing it, characterizing as a cyber incident, I think was purely understandably an optics thing. I think they didn't possibly understand the depth, the issue of this issue. They then stated probably prematurely, possibly, that they're bringing all the systems up and then they got hacked again. Again, that if you have any background or understanding in this a bit, it's a bit like seeing my house burned down and then it burned down again.
So it's not like, if there was ransomware, it's not like somebody got in, penetrated, put malware, put a lockdown on you and then decided, well, I'm gonna ease up, take you off the chokehold so you could bring stuff up and then do it again. That's interesting. The second thing though is just the reality that for most people out there, cybersecurity experts, CISOs out there, chief information security officers and CTOs, they will tell you it absolutely typically would take weeks to recover from this. And then even when that happens, you still have to investigate at that point what data was stolen as Yeren accurately described, they're gonna lock you down and they're gonna extract data to say that there was no breach on data was probably greatly premature if somebody was to assert that at this point. The next thing that's really important to understand is that from everybody I've spoken to experts and as you've known, I've built a number of systems that integrate, it's a monolithic architecture and a monolithic architecture basically means that once you break into an access point, you have open access to literally everything else that's inside that environment. First is a microservices environment which is what a Netflix and Amazon, a Tachyon or some of the other modern architectures will use. They do it on purpose because if you break in, you're basically isolated in a room, you can't get anywhere else. And then beyond that as Yeren would tell you, if you're dealing with a company, it's now become critical that they have ISO certifications that they have, SOC 1, they have SOC 2. And these things take one or two years to pass significant audits to achieve. You gotta ask your provider, do you have some kind of a red team? Are you hacking yourself? Do you have penetration reports? Do you have vulnerability reports? They should be able to share those with you. So I think this is like I said, a watershed moment for them. And I think unfortunately for CDK and my heart goes out to them and their associates. But I think this is a transformative moment and obviously probably not in a good way. We won't know the full fallout yet, Yossi. It's gonna come weeks and months past this. But I just think it's going to be possibly even more catastrophic than the event itself. It seems just frightening. I think this is a good segue to bring Melissa and Brad from Comply Auto.
所以,这并不是说,假如有勒索软件攻击,并不是说有人入侵了、渗透了、植入了恶意软件、对你系统进行了锁定,然后又决定放松一下、让你恢复系统、再进行一次攻击。这一点很有趣。不过还有一个现实情况是,大多数网络安全专家、首席信息安全官(CISO)和首席技术官(CTO)都会告诉你,从这种攻击中恢复通常需要数周时间。即使恢复了,你仍然需要调查到底哪些数据被盗了。就像 Yeren 准确描述的那样,攻击者会锁定你,同时会提取数据。说数据没有被泄露的话,现在看来可能过于乐观了。
接下来要理解的重要一点是,所有我谈过的专家都告诉我,而且正如你所知,我构建过一些集成系统,这些系统是单体架构。单体架构的意思是,一旦你破开了一个访问点,你就可以访问该环境中的所有其他部分。而在微服务架构中,例如 Netflix 和 Amazon 以及一些现代架构所使用的,你攻破一个点之后,只能在一个隔离的“房间”中,无法访问其他部分。除此之外,正如 Yeren 会告诉你的那样,如果你在与某家公司打交道,现在要求他们有 ISO 认证,他们有 SOC 1 和 SOC 2 认证。这些认证需要一到两年的时间通过严苛的审计才能取得。你必须问你的服务提供商,他们是否有红队(模拟攻击团队),他们是否进行自我攻击测试?他们是否有渗透测试报告和漏洞报告?他们应该能够把这些报告分享给你。
所以,我认为这是一个分水岭时刻。而不幸的是,对于 CDK 及其员工来说,我感到非常同情,我认为这是一个转折点,显然可能不是一个好的发展方向。我们目前尚不知道全部影响,要等数周甚至数月的时间才能知晓。但我认为这个事件的影响可能比事件本身更加灾难性。这听起来令人恐惧。我觉得这也是一个很好的契机,请 Melissa 和 Brad 来自 Comply Auto 上来讲讲。
So let me just table set for one second, right? Like I mentioned, automotive is a huge contributor of GDP, right? Roughly three, three and a half percent. Now, every day that dealers are operating significantly less efficiently or simply not operating in some cases, that's obviously a big hit to the economy. But specifically, right, if you drill down to the, if you drill down dealership by dealership, and I think this is, you know, other people here on the stage, Todd, Andrew, Vine, you might have some good insight here as well. But we know that, you know, if you don't sell a car today, or maybe you spot a car, right, you put a car on the road, you paper it, you know, later down the line, right? You can likely recoup many of those car sales. You might lose some and whatnot, but you can recoup some, many of them.
Service is a much different beast, right? Service is, you know, supports most deal shirts across the country, right? It's really the breadwinner of many operations. And, you know, you can't make more technicians. You can only get the technicians to work so much over time. I mean, they're humans. You know, every day of lost productivity and service is a day of lost productivity that you're likely not gonna get back in any way. And so this, obviously, every single day that goes by is having a huge impact on those employees, those operations.
But now, as I mentioned, Melissa, Brad, and I'll let both of you provide a quick intro on yourself. I wanted to shift the conversation here. You're both regulatory experts. Brad, you are Chief Regulatory Counsel at NADA, which is the National Auto Deal Association. You're also now Chief Regulatory Compliance Officer and head of legal at comply. Although, Melissa, you are a partner at a firm where you do federal, state, local government relations, and really opening this to either of you. So feel free to, you know, do the, you feel free to raise your hand on the icon here. I can go to either of you to start.
But I'd love to understand from you right now, every day that goes by, right? How detrimental is this? Is there a cutoff point, right? Is there a point where you say the stakes just got, you know, significantly higher, even higher than they're at right now, right? What does every day really look like here from a regulatory perspective, you know, potentially from a cost perspective, you know, take us, give us some light on that side of the house. Sure thing. This is Brad Miller, Melissa. I don't want to jump in, but me. Brad Miller, I'm with comply now, as you said, I was with NADA for a long time and private practice before that for a number of years. You know, it's a good question and it's a multifaceted question because there's lots of different places where the risks increase exponentially. Obviously you've talked about the operational issues. And again, I joined everyone else. My heart goes out, not only CDK, but to the dealers dealing with this, obviously on a daily basis and the folks out there working through it. But you've got the operational challenges which are apparent.
You know, you've got, I think it's interesting. I heard a couple of folks saying, you know, revisit the entire architecture the way this is done in their auto retail space. That may be, but I will say some of our clients, you know, at least anecdotally, who had been sort of prepared from a business continuity perspective, have been affected operationally to a far less dramatic degree. So in other words, there are things you can do to mitigate over time. Now you never want to think about this kind of thing, but this is, you know, if nothing else for all the dealers out there, if you're saying yourself, thank goodness it wasn't me this time, but what about next? Think about it ahead of time. It's just like anything else, right? I mean, dealers get hit with ransomware, businesses of all kinds get hit with ransomware and with issues like this and being prepared can really mitigate that operational challenge. Now, the other pieces of the risk that grow over time, as you said, are regulatory and legal.
And really it ties into, you know, the tie in under U.S. law generally is with respect to customer data. Now, as we know, dealers are the regulated entities. That's the part that people need to understand. And frankly, people, you know, at the OEM level, and at the vendor level, we spent years at NAD trying to explain this, because it's not very well understood. Dealers are the financial institutions under federal law.
Dealers are the controllers of the data under state privacy laws. Dealers are the entities that have these responsibilities. And so even though this happened at a vendor, ultimately, you know, the technical legal obligation will fall on the dealership. Now, there's lots of ways to mitigate it. Obviously, we would certainly hope that CDK will work with people on that saying that they won't help. But the dealer's gonna have to think about these things. So, notifying the FTC.
There's a recent rule that a lot of people don't know about. Just ironically came into effect about a month ago, May 13th of this year, it's a new part of the safeguards rule that requires you to notify the FTC when you have what they call a notification event. And we're at the point now, where it's a little unclear what this is a notification event, but I think it's almost becoming to the point where, you know, that question is answering itself.
I mean, the determination you have to make is, was the unencrypted data of 500 or more of your customers involved in an unauthorized acquisition event, right? So, the whole idea. Good question there. So, if thousands of dealers are obviously a CDK that was hacked, but that impacts thousands of dealers. Yep, who has the liability? You're saying the dealers have the liability? Well, yeah, I wanna be careful. It's a good question. It's not necessarily the liability. I just wanna make sure that they're ultimately the ones that have to do these things, right?
I mean, liability is fixed with indemnification clauses and contracts and those kinds of things. But, yeah, they are now, I'm talking about from a regulatory perspective. Yes, dealers have to file a report. We actually had, when I was in an AD, I had a webinar with an FTC lawyer, asked for this exact question last fall. So, what happens if one of the, if it's a service provider from the dealers that has a problem, they said, well, the dealer has to make sure this report's filed.
So, again, who actually does the report is less important than the fact that's gonna be a report that says Miller Motors had an issue on June 19th, involving customer data, and that's on a publicly available website. So, they've done that obviously on purpose because they want the world to know, they want the plaintiffs bar to know that there's been an issue. So, those risks will increase from a dealer perspective going forward, if, now this is all dependent on whether customer data, unencrypted customer data was involved.
And we don't know that at this point, I wanna be very, very clear, but that's sort of the trigger for one of these duties and frankly, some of the larger legal risks will transpire. And there are timing issues on these things. The safeguard rule is, you have to tell the FTC as soon as possible and no later than 30 days after discovery and discoveries that are an open question and we're sort of working through some guidance at compile out on exactly what it means for to discover this event.
But this, I don't wanna get the legal weeds on you now, but my point is you gotta do it quick. So, look, I've had a lot of consumers reach out to me here on X and they say, hey, should I go buy at a dealership? I'm concerned, was the dealership I'm gonna shop at hack? So, I would say to you or to your own or really to anyone here, but these groups that perform these hacks, right? Do they typically, right from my understanding, they're pretty professional, right?
As ironic as that sounds, I mean, these are professionally organized, right? They know what they're doing, but do they try to double dip? Meaning do they also take the data, try to maybe resell it on the black market and get ransom or are they like, hey, give us a ransom, we don't care about your data, just pay us and we're out. How does this occur? They've been talking to people at CSO, which is the federal agency, it says cybersecurity infrastructure, security agency, that's the federal agency that deals with these things.
They generally describe these, it varies, but the problem is you don't know, right? So you pay the ransom to get your systems unlocked and then as you're on noted, they give you the double, the double whammy of saying, then you gotta pay me to give you the data back. And by the way, if they give it back to you, there's no guarantee they're not going to then post it anyway or resell it again or come back to you and try to black value again. So it's an awful, awful, awful situation. And just by the way, just as a complete aside, believe it or not, there's actually legal jeopardy for paying this ransom, because you can be paying this to a criminal gang that's on the federal O-FAC list. So there's all sorts of, I mean, it's just a horrible, horrible situation to be in and there's no guarantees, right? I mean, you're right that they're professional, but they're criminals, right? And so they're blackmailing you and it's the problem with blackmail, as you get, you never know. So again, it's a problem, you can't guarantee it. I hope and pray that the answer comes back and says no unencrypted customer data was affected. That's the best outcome. If not, it raises issues. Yeah, look, let's take it a step further and look, we have some really great operators here and Andrew Wright is also on the stage. Andrew operates several extremely successful dealerships and he's the chair of the Hyundai dealer council. But I really wanna pose this to you, anyone here, but I mean, if this does not get solved in the next couple of weeks, week, whatever timeframe you wanna put it, and which based on what I heard here so far, it seems that that's pretty unlikely. Like Andrew, or what are you doing here? I mean, what are you waiting three months to get onboarded to another? Like, how do you operate? Like, what is an industry gonna do? I'm really curious on what is gonna be the impact, right? Are we gonna see inventory, the day supplies start to rise because dealers are selling fewer cars, which is gonna result in prices, prices going down on massive drop in, and vehicle prices? Are manufacturers gonna produce, help vehicle production? I mean, what is gonna happen?
First of all, thanks for having me on. I think the tentacles of this are far reaching and you just mentioned a couple of different scenarios that absolutely have merit. I take it one step further. There are several manufacturers out there that have monthly stair step programs that many dealers rely on to drive their profitability. And if we are not able to report sales and achieve those objectives, again, that's just another byproduct unforeseen ramification of a situation like this. So the tentacles are far reaching, but I wanna take a positive spin for a minute here. And I just wanna say that I found it extremely refreshing and heartening at how well the industry has really come together and rallied to try to support all the people that are impacted by this. This episode is brought to you by my very own car dealership guy, Industry Jobboard. CDGjobs.com, my industry job board connecting the best talent and automotive with the best companies will remain absolutely free for CDG listeners to post and fill available roles at their companies. This free job board is for anyone in automotive, vendors, dealers, lenders, manufacturers, auto tech, everyone. Already over 100 companies have posted open positions, including Lithium Motors, Recurrent, Credit Acceptance, Vero's Credit, Carse Commerce, Shift Digital, Plug, Full Path, Westlake, Trade Pending, you get the point. The best part is that when these companies hire through CDGjobs.com, they are hiring the most informed candidates in the marketplace.
So don't hesitate, you can add your open roles today by visiting CDGjobs.com or clicking the link in the show notes below. That's CDGjobs.com. And I think that's very encouraging. I think to see the other DMS companies stepping up and trying to offer their services to impacted dealers, certainly the state associations, NADA, the banks. I mean, I'm getting emails from all corners of the industry and I'm not even a CDK dealer. I'm on TechyOn, but a lot of my friends, most of my friends are on CDK. And I've been partied to many conversations about steps that are being taken to deal with this. And it's just really great to see how the industry is rallying to support those that are impacted by it.
But as many of the speakers that have already chimed in here have noted, I think the real question here is where do we go from here? And how does our industry now rally around a direction that we go, hopefully with consensus, that speaks to addressing the vulnerabilities in many of the systems architecture. That's a word that we're hearing a lot here today. How we address some of the vulnerabilities or all of the vulnerabilities in these legacy applications that have arguably more antiquated architecture as I think David alluded to and Aaron alluded to, this whole sort of monolithic approach versus that compartmentalized approach that does mitigate the impact of these things when they do happen.
So that's really gonna be the question. I've had a front row seat to many of those discussions as a former chair of the standards for technology and automotive retail, which has been extremely enlightening. And now here we are, we find ourselves in a situation where a combination of security protocols and data security being at the forefront of a major crisis in the industry. So hopefully we get this beyond behind us and we can all rally to prevent this from happening again in the future because we have to do it. Appreciate it Andrew. And Doug? Yes, Doug. Doug, yeah, I was just gonna add Andrew. I second what Andrew said, working with him on the Star Organization and ADA. He's also been, let me just sort of throw something else out there just to consider. And we've talked about sort of what this is in a mean long term. Let me just throw out a notion.
There's a concept in bank that has been bubbling up over the last 10 years in the banking sector for National Services sector called Open Banking, if you're familiar with it, which where the FinTech companies and the banks were sort of fighting over access to customer data and there's actually been some regulatory activity at CFPB through the Dodd-Frank Act. Long story short is they're coming to a consensus in the financial services industry about the way the customer information is handled to maximize the customer experience and to sort of be furious to let these the FinTech companies provide services and branch out for the banks, right?
And for consumers. Well, I think we do have a fundamental, if there is a fundamental question here, and again, I'm not saying it's tied to this issue, but if we have a fundamental question or a dealer being flexible enough to address this, there is and we fought these battles for many, many years in NADA and continuing on behalf of dealers is having full and full some ability to use the information that you have as a dealership, right? And some of it, some of what we've seen, but certainly when I was in NADA as sort of artificial restrictions on the ability to integrate and to use the data that is dealer information is really a problem in many ways.
And it does sort of hamstring some of the ability that dealers have to be flexible in terms of getting vendors and sort of doing things in their own to have different integrations and maybe even to build security into these things. So I'll just throw that out there as for those of you in the industry long enough, you probably know what I'm referring to, but the notion of having dealers have full and adequate control over their data and their systems is gonna be key to this because it'll let a thousand flowers of sort of competition and innovation bloom, I think. Hey, Brad, can I ask you a question?
So I mentioned that this in many ways will be a watershed moment. And I think everybody agrees with that for dealers. They're gonna expect more, ask more and demand more from their vendors to make certain that they are secure and their clients are secured to a much higher level. The law in Arizona that was passed that was upheld in their Supreme Court, which both Reynolds and CDK lost their battle, asserting that somehow if a dealer had access to their data, in other words, they weren't able to charge them for vendors accessing the data, that somehow that was gonna infringe on their copyright. Of course, the Supreme Court found that to be to not hold water and so that law stands.
There are varying levels of, and maybe you could speak to this, there's many people that believe to this day that the MS providers aren't necessarily adhering to that law the way they're supposed to and there are other states behind it, such as Oregon and California that are right behind. Do you think one of the watershed moments here is that this will cause our state associations for dealerships to work as hard as possible to get those types of laws passed? Yeah, and the state associations work very hard on a whole number of issues and believe me, they are working day and night for dealers all the time.
Yeah, the Arizona law is, as you said, it was one quite Supreme Court, but the Ninth Circuit did uphold it. And yeah, look, the concept here is just sort of, it gets complicated and I don't wanna unnecessarily tarnish either side of the debate, but the way the world is going is really, sort of an open API structure makes so much more sense than sort of some of the ways that things have been developing in the auto space. And again, it's a hard conversation to have in a limited period of time, but for those of you who understand this issue, the notion to be able to sort of interface on a much more in a way that dealers want, rather than the way that's sort of dictated by users or vendors is gonna be better for dealers at the end of the day.
Now, there's some arguments the other way. I do think at the end of the day, especially with this kind of atmosphere, the ability to protect data would be heightened. I don't know if there'll be a renewed interest in things like the Arizona law after this, perhaps, but it's, but I think it would certainly be a tool that dealers would have in the future just to be able to be more flexible in this kind of situation. You know, I gotta say guys real quick that David's V-SAC, my friend, always makes so many great points, but as a retailer that's on the front lines, I can tell you that I'm hopeful that what comes out of this most is a narrative again that really speaks to how our industry can rally to prevent this from happening in the future.
And I'm not so concerned about necessarily indicting this party or that party or pointing fingers. I'm looking to be solutions we're in in an outcomes base. So how can we look to other industries, for example? And I think Brad, you mentioned FINRA. You know, can we look to other industries for data security standards and for security protocols and maybe mimic some of those standards because Lord knows our industry, the auto industry, for those of us that have been around it a long time, you know, we tend to be a little bit behind the times and behind the curve. And maybe that's a contributing factor to why we find ourselves in this circumstance. But, you know, how do we work together to come out the other side stronger and better for it? That's the narrative that I think we need to be advancing.
Okay, and just one thing, Andrew, you're Mercedes-Benz dealer amongst other things. And Mercedes-Benz is such a great example of what you just shared because they are legendary for two things. One is innovation, superiority when it comes to engineering. But what many people may not realize is that although they created things like ABS and airbags and, you know, all the lane detection that we see today on everything from Kia's to Ferraris, Mercedes-Benz, what's extraordinary is when they invent something, create something, engineer something that is important from a safety perspective, they share it with other manufacturers at no cost because their number one driver is making certain that they are advancing to your point. They're advancing the overall industry when it comes to secure, when it comes to providing the safest transportation possible.
And it would be a pretty amazing thing for us to do the same thing here on technology. I wanna push the conversation forward. Thanks guys, it's been really insightful. And I wanna fast forward here. We got Brian Benstock on the stage. Brian runs PowerGob Honda. I'll save the intro, Brian. You can intro yourself. It'll be much better than majoring for you. But you are an impacted dealer. We've had some conversations and would love for you to give us some insight to how you're getting around the struggle right now and how you've really been able to operate in line of all these outages.
Hey, Jose, good to be here with you and good to hear so many good friends making great comments, especially appreciate the insights from David and Andrew Wright. They really always show up guys and write on. I think the goal for Paragon and our stores is to keep this seamless to our customers. I think that's the obligation that we have to protect the current data that we have with them and to do business as best we can. And I'm happy to say it's not been that bad. Being a dinosaur, I was around when we did things with a legal pad and a yellow marker and surprisingly, no customers ever walked into Paragon asking me who's your DMS provider? And so that being the case, we've kept it seamless. The accounting team on our end and we've got a pretty strong lead in that and show it. They're the ones that are gonna experience the difficulties making sure that we have accountability for the transactions we've concluded. Right now I'm sitting here in my office and parts are presumably going over the counter and making sure that we have a good count on those parts and accountability is gonna be critical. And again, back to the green boards and back to the old way we've done business. As far as the vulnerabilities are concerned, it's a real eye opener. This can happen to anybody. So certainly don't wanna throw rocks or colleagues at CDK because tomorrow it can be any one of the other DMS providers. The fears, of course, it's bad parties would hit the alt delete button and delete our database and then we'd have to go about trying to reconstruct the database and the value, of course, of our franchises is incredibly tied to that database. The blue sky is a direct reflection on the robust nature of the database. So it puts us in a situation where I've got to have a backup to the database that I, we, as the dealers control that is housed someplace that is not subjected to the internet that's possible. It's gotta be a hard backup copy of the database that's updated on a periodic basis, plugged in, updated, and then unplugged. And presumably that would give us some level of comfort. But again, my heart goes out to the people at CDK and to the dealers. We don't know the extent of this yet and hopefully they can put this behind them quickly. Brian, how long are you prepared? How long are you growing up preparing for? Like what are the conversations like in your dealership when you're speaking with the team, right? What is the timeframe here? We don't have a crystal ball, you know, but it's whatever it takes. And you know, we think that we've heard rumors like everybody else that there's been a request or a demand for payment and that there's some steps being taken in that direction. We've heard rumors that the federal government does not want to be directly involved, but the federal government is encouraging them to resolve it. And I'm encouraging them to resolve it. You know, we're car guys, right? What's that saying? Your first loss is your best loss. And so take that loss. It's not gonna get better with time. You're gonna have dealers that are gonna get wounded and the lawsuits will be unbearable from CDK. I'm not aware, I'm not giving them advice, but it seems based on the limited amount of information that I have that make the best deal you can and move on, prevent it from happening, as best you can in the future and move on. Even with that, you're still gonna have a lot of rubble to sift through. But I think the longer this goes on, the more difficulty we're gonna face.
My biggest question is, how do you end the month and how do you produce a financial statement? And when does that happen? You know, and are people have to get paid on aggregating commissions to pay people what a nightmare? And to turn that to me. But, you know, I think we are a resilient bunch. We will automobile dealers and we'll get through this. Thank you, Brian. And I know we tried to get Melissa on earlier. I shared some audio issues. Melissa, can you hear us now? I can hear you. Can you hear me? Yes, we hear you well.
Melissa, we were having a conversation about just, you know, the regulatory framework here and, you know, the impact and every day that goes by, you know, how much more detrimental is this when it just passes the first of the month? Did you have any insight into that side of the world? So certainly a few observations. You know, I've been in politics for 25 years and working in the automotive space for almost all of that. And I will tell you, in this particular space, you know, car dealers and the automotive retail process is probably among the most highly regulated components of the entire industry, as we know it, of any industry, from production of the vehicle, the retail experience, most importantly, the consumer experience, which of course we're talking about and then the end of life of the vehicle.
And what I've also learned in those many years of working in politics is that governments like to be reactionary and they like to have credit given for what they've done to help consumers, which are of course voters. They like to investigate, they like to review. And in some cases, they like to come out with legislation to quote fix the problem. You know, there's always this running joke in Washington like, hey, we're from the government and we're here to help, right? Well, we're not looking necessarily for any help here and to the earlier panelist point.
You know, it's important to watch the business component of this play out. And what we don't want is to let this drag on where the government, whether it's state or federal and sometimes local, would feel the need to intervene. We don't want that. We want this to handle itself and for the businesses and consumers and more importantly, the dealers to have a say in how this happens. You know, it's an unfortunate juxtaposition for a dealer where they're consumer facing, but this isn't their fault, right? Yes, they chose the vendor. I feel horribly for CDK and what they're handling here. But the dealer doesn't have an answer to their customer to say, when's my car going to be done? And dealers are always creative, always put the consumer first, we'll figure this out. But these next week or so, you know, two weeks is going to be very interesting. And I wouldn't be surprised if you saw states or the federal government looking for at least a hearing on what happened here.
Wow, that's good. I mean, that's pretty big. I mean, if you're saying a hearing, at least, that's an an an ancous surprising, but to hear it from someone like yourself, that takes it to a different level. Well, and I would say the problem here for this particular instance is dealers and automotive in general, we're already all talking about data privacy, right? And this is a federal issue, a state issue. We've got 18 states that I know was discussed previously that have already implemented data privacy laws. The feds are looking at doing it. There's actually a hearing on Thursday, unrelated to automotive on the American Privacy Rights Act. That bill's probably not going to see the light of day after the hearing, but it will pass on Thursday.
So I think it's always important to know that policymakers are watching, but it doesn't mean we don't have responses and more importantly, relationships, you know, car dealers, frankly, have some of the best relationships of anybody with their elected officials. So no doubt there's a conversation happening about what's going on, but it'll be very interesting to see what happens in the next week. We're certainly very hopeful this is fixed sooner than later to sort of prevent a longer dialogue around it, but I wouldn't be surprised if there's a conversation going forward that uses this as an example. In my experience, there are three major issues in automotive that have happened, the manufacturer bankruptcies, the COVID experience, and now this, this is big news. I couldn't help but think about the Boeing CEO getting grilled for the last few months, understandably, because of the many, many issues they've had with safety and fallout from the 737 accident and a number of other things.
Do you think it's likely to your point that it's gonna be almost impossible for the CEO of CDK to not find themselves there because one of the things that dealers are going to have to know unequivocally is what of my data, whether it's financial, whether it was transactional, operational, warranty data, customer data, what data was compromised? I think the answer to that question will determine whether or not there's going to be a hearing of anyone from CDK. If it turns out that they were able to stop the bleed, if you will, that's one thing. If it turns out that millions of consumer transactions and PII are now public or are in some way available and compromised, that's gonna be a huge issue. And I, there's gonna have to be somewhere, someone is going to have to be responsible for this. And I think a lot of it is somewhat remains to be seen. It was their consumer harm. What does that look like? How many people were impacted? Once we know that information will have a better feel for the government response. But as I said earlier, there are so many regulators that know their car dealers, have those relationships, will appreciate the horrible position that dealers are in here. So I think it's a little bit TBD on what that ultimately looks like. But I- Hey Melissa, Brian Bentzau. You know, ultimately the customers entrusted us with their data. And ultimately we, the dealer are responsible for the deal with the customers, doesn't know from CDK or Reynolds or Techion. And so, you know, that is a concern, what happened with that data? Were they able to, is there something encrypted in the data now that gives the bad actors the ability to get back into that data? We were on a network system.
We were, I don't wanna say sold, but we were convinced to have your data is only as safe as the network, and we paid a fortune to have a secure network through CDK. That secure network records every keystroke at every desktop in my store, which means if somebody here is going through a bank and putting in codes to access a bank that in theory, that information's floating someplace where it shouldn't be. And that those are daunting, daunting concerns. You know, now you've got consumer data and you've got, you know, the working capital exposed you to every dealer that was a CDK dealer that was on that network. And Brian, you were dialed in on all this is Brian Kramer, but you think you're dialed in on this, but how many dealers do you think are really tuned into this? I've only only the last two years realized, not a lot of how we learned during COVID that we're not vertically integrated from a supply chain standpoint when they're building cars, but in the dealership world, we're not vertically integrated on a cloud-based architecture and you know, compared to a traditional network system. But with a cloud-based native architecture, you can rely on security updates, patches, like on the spot, just like they do in over the air updates and cars, which obviously eliminates the vulnerability, but it also makes it faster. But nothing's ever a big deal till it's a big deal, but how many dealers do you think even are tuned into this problem to be able to go to the depth that you're going? But Brian, I think the auto choke is just going to unpeel itself. You know, as you see layer of layer being stripped away, you realize the difficulties, the challenges, the vulnerabilities that we're facing. You know, and you know, I think it gives us, you know, in fact, I have a presentation I'm doing on Wednesday.
And to really talk about, you don't realize how much you value something till it's gone. And I think you can take your database for granted and none of us overtly take our database for granted. But you know, the notion of losing that database and what it would take to recreate that database and how, what the power is in being able to tap into that database properly as a dealer. All the different people in all the third party, three PA access to your DMS, not maybe years, that the dealers give arbitrarily to so many different vendors that might not have the right cyber security insurance which David Speedzak just brought me up to speed on. Or the end user license agreements of what they can do with your data. Some of them can sell your data. Brian, can you tell me one person has proper cyber security insurance? The insurance companies limit that. And you know, some dealers, I know 2 million, 3 million, 4 million, 5 million, 10 million. I mean, these are miniscule coverages, amounts of coverages, compared to the potential liability on the law side. And you know, the insurance companies are not in the law's business, they're in the collecting premium business. And they do put caps on what the amount of coverage you can have for cyber security.
So, you know, I would think most of us given a catastrophic loss of data, would find ourselves in a position where we're not properly insured. You know, what David said on the ISO certifications. Another good point with what Brian's saying is that in Northern California, farmers and state farm, you can't get fire insurance on your home anymore. If you go to USAA because of the lane changing technology, you know, rates are up 75%, you have another insurance company just last week announced that they eliminated pet insurance. In other words, the stakes are getting the risks or getting insurance at- It's a lot more to them. They're getting so high at this point, how many more, you know that what the total ransomware was last year that was paid, $1.1 billion. You'd think that the cyber insurance companies are paying attention to that. And think about this, if you look at GLBA, the Grand Leach Blyley Act, $35,000 per customer record, you're talking a wimpy 300 records, what amount to $10 million. So if you have $10 million coverage, great, you're covered for your first 300 customers. What do I do about the other $5,000?
I think that, I mean, you know, regulations, law, hearings, all these things are very important in order to shape the future of the industry and what is right to do and how to affect, you know, the safety of data and all these things. But from a business perspective, I think that in the next few weeks, if I'm a dealer, I would really start to think about it as, think about this as something that will take time. I think some of the speakers spoke about that. I mean, you can't wait for it and think, okay, this is gonna be just for a few days or even a week, just really transition into a different mode of operation. That's the first thing. And the other thing that I'm taking from this is, you know, it's really important that the architecture is part of how you safeguard your business continuity. Like what do you have for CRM? What do you have for DMS? And what do you have in the middle with all of the cash registry? How do you take your money? How do you take charge, close deals, loans? How do you do all that in a seamless way that serves the customer? If we wanna serve our customers, sell cars, keep the data safe. We have to have all, each one of these parts safe. And again, from a cybersecurity perspective, you need to start thinking about the processes, the people and how are you taking care of their knowledge about this and the technologies. Some of you mentioned, you know, encryption, things like that. There's so many new technologies out there that the dealers are just not seeing because the industry is just so broken in so many ways in the way it consumes technology. There are really high level encryption technologies today. VPNs don't count anymore. The hackers know how to move through VPNs. It's like nothing to them. It's air. They know how to move through it. Do you have a two FA? All these little things. Some are not having posted notes on the monitor with the password on it. Exactly, exactly.
Yeah, I want to have a wrap up in 15 minutes. And I want to give an opportunity for a couple of questions from the audience. I think the beauty of this forum is there's everyone from dealers to consumers to just industry enthusiasts in the audience. And I'm sure some people have questions after anyone here on the stage or anyone who would like to take some questions. So if anyone does have any questions, please request to come up to the stage and we'll have a couple people brought up. And before we do that, while people are requesting Todd, I know you had. I know you had something you wanted to say to go ahead. Sure. Yeah, you'll see. Thanks for having me. I appreciate it. Just a couple of comments on what everybody had to say today. There's going to be ripple effects from this. You think about business interruption insurance, right? Like, how is that going to kick in for dealers? Who's it going to affect? What carriers is it going to affect? There's probably a lot of consumers that are listening to this too. And like Brian Dunstok said, they don't have CDK or Reynolds and Reynolds or they don't care.
好的,我希望在15分钟内总结完毕。我也想给观众提供一个提问的机会。我认为这个论坛的美妙之处在于,观众中有从经销商到消费者乃至行业爱好者的各种人群。我相信在座的一些人对台上或台下的人会有一些问题。所以如果有人有问题,请请求上台,我们会有几个人被邀请上来。在此之前,当大家请求上台时,Todd,我知道你有话要说,请继续。好的,谢谢让我发言,我非常感激。今天我想对大家所说的发表几个评论。这将会产生连锁反应。你想想业务中断保险,对吧?比如,它会如何影响经销商?会影响哪些承运商?可能还有很多消费者在听这个论坛,正如Brian Dunstok所说,他们没有使用CDK或Reynolds and Reynolds系统,也不在乎这些系统。
But I can tell you, from my perspective, right, as a consultant, you know, today, you know, I went to the dealership that I sold to public and I scheduled an appointment last week online after this outage took place. They're on CDK. They put a tire on my car this morning. They changed the oil on my car this morning. I was in and out in an hour. I happened to attend a sales meeting with all my old people, which felt great. But they sold some cars over the weekend. They had a lot of leads over the weekend. And, you know, they were getting by. For consumers, it may just be a little bit of an inconvenience or a little bit of a slower process when you're at the dealership. But all in all, I don't see this having a huge negative impact on the use car market or the new car market, even if this goes on for an extended period of time. And if it ended tomorrow or the next day, it still will be felt for weeks in a car dealership, mainly by what Brian Dunstok said.
The accounting people, especially, are going to have a very difficult time and their productivity will definitely be affected 100%. But all in all, this is definitely a wake-up call, the industry for sure. And all these things that we've talked about over the years with the way software works in a car dealership and the architecture and the networking, it's all coming ahead now. And the only other comment I'll make, it would be nice to hear from leadership, from the dealer's perspective, from CDK. I mean, I don't know of any dealers that have really heard anything from anybody in leadership at CDK, at all, other than just some emails with telling us, you know, telling dealers when they're going to be back up again, it'd be nice to hear from them.
It'd also be nice to hear from them from the pro-wealths, from NADN. They can't, they can't. I understand it. I understand that they can't, but still, it'd be nice to hear something. They're on lockdown, the situation's fluid. They don't want to cause, to say something that would cause the bad actors to do something. I think, you know, it's understandable. They've got to keep that information as close as possible. And any suggestion that they're going to make to give us encouragement, here's what's happening, is fluid and probably wouldn't be appropriate. I agree, I would love to. I've got dear friends at the top level there, and I'm getting these damn corporate answers that I don't want, but I get it, I get it, I get it. We've got to let this thing play out just a little bit. And again, I don't disagree with what you're saying. But is it practical matter when you're living it, you got to let it play out.
All right, let's take a couple of questions. We got John Acosta here in Raja Gupta. So John, we'll start with you. If you can just address the question to someone specific, or if it's a general question. Hey, Yosie, just wanted to say thank you for what you're doing for the industry. It's a critical time that needs critical leadership. So thank you for what you're doing. But to the dealer operators in the room, how are you guys handling crisis communication? Because during this time, you know, it's muddy waters. What I was asking is, you know, Brian, dealer operators in the room, and Andrew, are you guys handling the crisis communication? I know that during these cyber attacks, there's a lot of false information that goes out, false starts, impersonation scams. How are you guys dealing with and communicating with your teams? What does that cadence look like? Keep it seamless to the customers. We'll get through this. You'll get paid. The customers don't care what's happened to CDK. They are interested in the service and sales products that we offer.
You got to keep their head in the game. Most of the salespeople at our store don't directly deal with CDK. They're dealing with ACRM. We have a different CRM set in place for them to keep the information, letting them know the website traffic, giving them data. The website traffic is actually up, not down. People are still looking for cars. And again, nobody ever inquires who's a CRM company. I'm walking in the door. And so it should be a non-issue to the customers and to the extent we can keep it a non-issue for more staff. I think that's great.
Brian, can I ask you and Yossi, these people that are out that are even worse actors that are attempting to portray themselves as CDK, and I'll get your store back online, these scammers. Has anybody been able to out any of those people thus far? Not that I know of. It's, from what I understand, it's pretty common. People are trying to ride the wave and do some phishing scams. But not that I know of, although it is happening and super prevalent. Pretty disgusting. David, I watched that Ashley Madison Netflix thing a couple of weeks ago about their hack. And this has got all the same telltale signs of that. And the Ashley Madison people didn't take the bluff, but it treated the threat as a bluff. And really, it's the detriment of so many of the people that were on that site. People would say, well, that serves them right. But it speaks to that.
布莱恩,我能问问你和尤西吗?那些假扮成CDK(软件公司)并声称可以让你的店铺重新上线的骗子,比这些骗子更可恶的人,有没有人能把他们揭露出来?据我所知,没有。从我的了解来看,这种情况很常见,人们试图趁机进行网络钓鱼诈骗。但据我所知,目前还没有人揭露这些人,不过这种情况确实很普遍,真是恶心。大卫,我几周前看了 Netflix 上关于 Ashley Madison 黑客事件的纪录片。这次的情况和那个事件有很多相似之处。Ashley Madison 当时没有把威胁当回事,但实际上那个威胁并不是虚张声势,结果害了很多使用该网站的人。有人会说,他们活该,但这件事就说明了这个问题。
CDK has also hired people from Europe to take a look at this. They seem to have found where the bad actors are. And I think, again, the quicker they can resolve this, the less painful it's going to be for CDK and for their customers. Hey, you see this Brad Miller, maybe just on John's good question, just to what Brian said. I've just- Brad, you could just keep it to 30 seconds. I want to- Yeah, 30 seconds. I just want to- Brad Tuscaudia, operator. Oh, absolutely. I'm sorry. Keep it consistent. You don't want to- You want to make sure your people are not telling customers something that ultimately turns out to be true. Like, you know, what your data was involved, something like that. And the other piece is, think now about what and whether you're going to be telling people when you have been notified of them under state law.
So I won't belabor you here. But there's a couple of decisions to be made. We got some guidance on that on our website. If you want to look at it, specific issues you want to think about now in terms of what you're telling people. So thanks. Can I jump in for 10 seconds? Go ahead. Just a word to the wise. Yeah, just a word. Sorry. Please, team, you know, everybody involved with this, make sure that you're talking to your cybersecurity teams and looking for lateral movement from CDK in the case that there is a springboard attack after this, that they're looking at lateral movement because CDK has core access or admin access to your workstations, that they're really making sure that there's no lateral movement from those programs inside of your dealership inside the dealership workstation systems.
John, what else does that mean? Does that mean like what email, the email servers hosted by the same company or phone systems, like what all could be, what could they do potentially? So CDK works is it has core system access to your workstations, right? So you'd be able to get access to their system and they can push updates. They recently pushed out an R&M call called Adaptiva that is literally a remote management and monitoring system. And if depending on what the size and scope of the attack is, they could potentially have admin access to your system. So what we did is isolate those systems as fast as possible, quarantine those systems.
And over the next couple of weeks, as we see this open back up, we're gonna be hyper-vigilant of looking for a lateral movement or, you know, ring fencing the applications inside of CDK. So they're not talking to other applications that they're not supposed to be talking to, right? So if you see movement from CDK going to, let's say SharePoint, that's a movement that's gonna be very odd, that's gonna trigger the security operation center to create an alert, isolate that device and make sure that there's not a ransomware attack that's springboarding from the CDK. Appreciate the insight, Tom. Thanks for that. And Marzia, we can hear you now.
We'll go Marzia Frank, we'll wrap up with Dan and that'll wrap up the segment. So if we more questions, go ahead. Yeah, great. Thanks. Thanks for squeezing me in here. So sorry if I might have missed this earlier, but I'm curious, like for the dinners, you know, a little last few days, is there a way to quantify, you know, what kind of impact are you already starting to see in the business in terms of either sales or service work lost due to the outage, you know? Is there a way? You just got cut off, but I think we heard your question. Anyone wanna answer that? Anyone?
The dealers I've spoken with are, the dealers I've spoken with say that the cost is not so much financial, it's gonna be time. And it's gonna be like Brian was talking about staying there late, having to keep people there at the end of the month or next month or paying somebody on an accrued type of payroll and then trying to true everything up and having to do the same work two or three times. And the redundancy of not being able to generate new business because the old business is the most expensive expense that they're gonna have. Yeah, let's not make that mistake. Get your people paid. This is not on them. You know, we've got to make sure you get your people paid error on the side of overpaying and underpaying. And hopefully the manufacturers, hopefully the flow-playing companies, hopefully the warranty companies are all gonna be flexible with this, but you don't want flexibility from the employees when it comes to compensation. Make sure that that flow keeps going because people got bills. Thanks, Brad. We're gonna move on to more questions here. We got Frank, go ahead.
Just wanted to recognize the group, particularly all those powers that be for the dealership group representing the aftermarket. Some would think that the aftermarket is sort of the arch-rival we're not. We're all one big, happy family. I do wanna recognize, particularly here in Scottsdale, Arizona and throughout Arizona market. I've talked to many of my peer, I think, the dealerships are handling it well. The got unsung heroes, particularly in our case, our parts counter people that are getting it done. I think at the end of the day, there'll be a quantification of the cost, but in the end, this is a great example of how we really need to build these work cultures to be able to pivot on a dime. So I thank everyone here, particularly in the dealership groups, for taking care of us here in the aftermarket. Thanks, Dan. I appreciate that. However, way to end, it's been a crazy couple of days, and I'm sure this week is gonna continue to be interesting. Dan, we did just lose Dan, so we'll wrap that up. We'll wrap that up. No more questions for now. But appreciate everyone for tuning in.
We're gonna do a recap of this entire podcast. It'll be live on the Cardio Shub Guide podcast tomorrow as well, edited, so you can share it with anyone who you think would find it valuable. And as information continues to come out, I'll be sure to share it with all of you. Thanks everyone for joining us, and the Cardio Shub Guide.