CDK: All Dealers Should Be Reconnected By Wednesday Or Thursday

The software maker says it’s continuing to restore systems nearly two weeks after it was struck by a ransomware attack.

CDK Global said Monday that it expects to complete the recovery from its recent ransomware attack by later this week, with a projection that all car dealerships will be reconnected to its platform by July 4 at the latest.

The disclosure comes as thousands of dealerships continue to face major disruptions to their operations, nearly two weeks after the crippling cyberattack against software maker CDK.

[Related: CDK Ransomware Attack Highlights Growing Threat Of Third-Party Risk: Experts]

Austin, Texas-based CDK, a provider of software used by 15,000 dealerships, said in a statement Monday that it is “continuing our phased approach to the restoration process and are rapidly bringing dealers live” onto its Dealer Management System (DMS).

“We anticipate all dealers connections will be live by late Wednesday, July 3 or early morning Thursday, July 4,” the company said in the statement provided to CRN.

CDK provides SaaS-based CRM, payroll, finance and other key functions for car dealerships, leading to widely felt disruption in the wake of back-to-back attacks that began June 18.

In a recorded message for customers heard Monday, the company indicated that the disruptions from the attacks are continuing to impact customers, though CDK said that its “customer care support channels are now live.”

The company said on Friday that it had brought “one of our large public dealers” back on to its core DMS, along restoring the DMS access for a second “small group” of dealerships. CDK had said the first small group was restored onto its DMS system Thursday.

In the statement Monday, CDK said that with the restoration of its “customer care channels,” customers can now “call, chat or submit eCases if they need assistance.”

“We are also actively working on bringing other applications live, including our Customer Relationship Management (CRM), ONE-EIGHTY and Service solutions,” the company said MOnday.

Pair of Attacks

While CDK was working to recover from the first attack on June 18, the company said it was struck by a second attack the following day. “Late in the evening of June 19, we experienced an additional cyber incident and proactively shut down most of our systems,” CDK said in a previous statement provided to CRN. The system shutdown resulted in an outage that has severely affected thousands of car dealerships.

CDK has declined to comment on media reports indicating that the company was planning to make a ransom payment, purportedly worth tens of millions of dollars, with the goal of recovering its systems more quickly.

A forecast issued last week by J.D. Power and GlobalData, meanwhile, indicated that total new-vehicle sales for June were expected to drop by as much as 7.2 percent from the same month a year earlier, in the wake of the CDK disruptions.

“Because of the disruption to dealer software systems, June sales will not be reflective of actual consumer demand for new vehicles,” a J.D. Power executive, Thomas King, said in a news release. King noted that “a significant number of sales” are likely to be pushed out to July.