For more than a week, most car dealerships in America have been unable to sell cars, and they don’t sell a lot of branded shirts or bottled water, so it’s a pretty existential crisis. This is because of a middleman, a dealer management software system called CDK Global, that has been out of commission since June 19 because of a ransomware attack. CDK has on when the problems will ultimately be resolved.
In the meantime, customers have to the handful of dealerships that don’t use CDK, and other dealerships have to try and fashion a temporary solution. Dealers hobbled by the hack it may take years to make up for the financial loss. If this sounds familiar, it is: the hack of a middleman taking down an important piece of the U.
S. economy. Earlier this year, it was a hack of , a payment software solution for the health care system, that crippled hospitals and other providers.
Before that it was SolarWinds, another software company for network IT infrastructure, that was hacked; it was later discovered that an intern at the company to the file server as “solarwinds123,” practically inviting hackers inside the system. And even more recently, Evolve Bank & Trust, the partner bank to fintech companies enveloped in the that has left 200,000 people with no access to their money for over a month, announced , and when it didn’t comply with the ransom, the hackers released 33 terabytes of financial data onto the internet. The common thread here is an economy of middlemen, a gr.