Push Back On the Hack, Techs As Athletes

Paul J Daly: 0:00

Good. Morning It is Thursday, June 20. It is a busy, busy busy daily auto industry. Obviously we have some major things going on with the CDK. ACC. We're going to talk about pushing back on the hack today as well as some positive things happening. We got to balance it out today. I feel

‍Kyle Mountsier: 0:30

it's just the some balance balancing act. Yes. That's all it is.

Paul J Daly: 0:34

That's nothing feels very simple about the people who are on having having the issues today. That's for

Kyle Mountsier: 0:39

sure. Everywhere. It is wild like the Yeah, we'll get into it.

Paul J Daly: 0:43

Yeah, we will. We will we will. What are what things we have talked about, we have tied Kabuto on the show this morning to talk a little bit about this. We're also trying to put together a special live stream that is going to feature a lot of dealers and industry partners. So we can like maybe share some information on best practices in situations like this. How we can kind of like help everybody get through it. Oh, I should have wore my no crisis can win shirt. Oh, that would have been right out. Oh, we'll get those going. Again. I do have my push back shirt. So hey, go. I got some of these guys sitting around back here. All right, we're gonna put the revive these I got nothing back there. Bring we're gonna revive these back, bring back. Back. We still got the stickers too. There you go. What are we what are we releasing today? Listen. So yesterday, I spent some time in Philly with a dealer and I was driving down. And I listened to so many ASOTU CON sessions podcasts. And I couldn't help but think because I listened to him actually didn't go 1.5 had a lot of time. So I was like, let's go 1.25 Let's let it soak in a little bit for kids can't do normal speeds. Can't do that. Rest in

Kyle Mountsier: 1:51

it a little bit, you know,

Paul J Daly: 1:52

but I was thinking like, this is such a great little drip feed for anyone who wants to learn about the other areas of the industry. It is so good. And we say it every time. But listen to some of the ASOTU CON sessions podcasts, so to con sessions, because they're really short and like you're talking inventory, you're talking TV strategies, talking tech. You're talking people and it's like boom, before you know it the episodes over and you're like

Kyle Mountsier: 2:19

I want more and I'm just honestly I'm grateful to effective for giving us the ability for three years running now at the center of that podcast together. Like if it wasn't for them putting that stage together doesn't happen and you're talking I think at this point over 50 interviews that are like quick and snappy, but give you a ton of context for the industry. So it was probably go back to all three years listen to all of

Paul J Daly: 2:43

them and still learn it is like a masterclass. It's so fun to listen to the other hosts too, because you and I definitely don't host the majority of these. I got to hear you host some which was fun. Joe Overby did a fantastic job, hosting Atlanta, Atlanta tickets. He did a great job. And so it's fun to do you get a variety of hosts, you get a lot of flavor in there. And I got to hear you know, a supercharged mariachi band interrupt you and Mike stand that was worth the price of admission. That was ridiculous. It was so good. Like that is not the music telling us that our time is up. It was unbelievable. All right, let's get into let's get into the top story. The big story yesterday's cyber attack against CDK global DMS disrupted nearly 15,000 dealerships and halted various operations if you're on it. You know, this is the system that ties together parts service accounting, finance, insurance, inventory, cashier tasks, basically, leaving a lot of dealers to have to figure out what to do in an email to customers. They wrote that again, this is this morning, so Takapuna is on the show, he sent me a text early this morning. Basically CDK wrote and said, We're sorry to inform you, we've experienced an additional cyber incident late in the evening, last night, out of continued caution to protect our customers, we're once again proactively shutting down our systems, currently assessing overall impact at this time, we don't have an estimated timeframe for resolution, therefore, our dealer systems will not be available at a minimum at a minimum.

Kyle Mountsier: 4:11

Today, my guess is this is going to last that weekend.

Paul J Daly: 4:15

So read a case, you know who she is CEO of rare case, automotive, she's, you know, like we're back to pencil and paper, she said, we'll just have to do it manually. It's not different than when a hurricane comes. And we're out of power. We just have to do things by hand and then recreate it we're following the instructions CDKs given to protect the integrity of the rest of our information. She does say that she has been with CDK since 1979. Yeah, right. And that's

Kyle Mountsier: 4:41

my whole life, my whole life through a fair share of this like ups and downs similar to this.

Paul J Daly: 4:47

And so this is not like and we want to be really careful about this right? Like no matter which DMS it is, everybody right now is like holy crap, right? Because this this can happen to anyone so it's there's not shade on CDK This is Just a coordinated attack. It happens to the biggest companies in the world. Teddy more CEO of edmore Sato group, one of the largest private groups in the country have over 50 stores. He said, This is a fun way to wake up the day he said told automotive news reading a text when his team just simply sent him there has been a cyber event. You know, he said CDK is an important tool for us. But my team isn't completely relying on them. Because our group will continue to take care of customers sell and service cars.

Kyle Mountsier: 5:27

Yeah, before we bring Todd in, I want to you know, yesterday, I was just looking up like what other big companies go through this. In the last seven years Equifax cap, one target, LinkedIn, Marriott, Uber, and many more have all experienced cyber attacks at this level, that have impacted functionality and their ability to deliver their products. So it's not new. I've also wrote this to a group of marketers yesterday, you know, the auto genius community said, you know, and this is the same of the asoto community, like you have the opportunity to be the face of reason and calm during internal communications at the store and external communications to other providers, and CBK reps today, because it's impacting everybody. Yep. And being the negative Nancy on the block is not the solution.

Paul J Daly: 6:14

That is not let's bring Todd in. Todd is not a negative Nancy. He's a positive Todd. Oh, did we just lose Todd? No, no, no, no, he's coming off. Our our software's a little slow today. There are areas that was us. Not you, Todd. Good morning. Oh, we're gonna have the old satellite delay. Today. Todd, can you hear us? Oh, boy. All right. Nathan will let you communicate with him on the back channel, and try to get him back in. Meanwhile, while we're waiting for Todd to come in, let's do the last story. The last story, we'll get back back to

Kyle Mountsier: 6:51

it because we got we both have thoughts on this too. So yeah, we do. All right. So let's,

Paul J Daly: 6:55

let's balance it out a little positivity. And, yeah, then we're gonna get back CDK talking about what we're going to try to do to bring people together to get you some best practices information so you can see what other people do and maybe be able to even share some resources, right like some documents, some write ups and things like that. But here's a fun one. cartomizers automotive celebrating new apprentice technicians with get this signing ceremonies, similar to college athlete signings to honor and promote careers in auto repair. So fun to see. So basically, they include family and friends, local media, politicians, they get 100 to 150 attendees at these things to cheer as the new apprentices are signing these contracts. But Bethel HSC talent acquisition specialist at CMA says the benefits of these things and benefits of working in the trades you know, no college debt, great earning potential. She said we want to celebrate with these students as they enter a career path to earn a living wage with no college debt and all that potential at the ceremony as apprentices get hand tools. You know, they get their dealership gear, there's a picture of them all sitting at the table with the pens and things like that. One of the new Tech's Danny Medina said it was really exciting there was a time when I was worried about not knowing where I was going to start a career. So it was great to finally see myself having a crew set up for me look

Kyle Mountsier: 8:16

this signing ceremony thing is so smart. Right because like it puts an emphasis on like your professional This is a career path this is an exciting thing that you get to be a part of your family can celebrate around you they feel important they feel like someone's accomplish something right like this is this is something that i MAN i would love to see like just signing ceremonies popping up all over the country right

Paul J Daly: 8:47

like what a little berry

Kyle Mountsier: 8:48

adventuring day

Paul J Daly: 8:49

right we need a table some pens, right a backdrop little right as a backdrop fanfare invite people out like when it makes so much sense media and politicians. It's like yes, they want to take credit for good things going on in their community. Right they will show up and cue imagine like just as a new apprentice tech you go from this one side of feeling like all these other people are going to college to this feeling of like I have so much value to this company. They're making this much of a big deal like you think they're going to show up to work on time the next day. Ready to go

Kyle Mountsier: 9:23

I can only imagine what Brian Ortega and Nathaniel Greg click would do with signing day live stream fanfare you got then then they're gonna have like the sports center desk over on the side like next up we have you know, it's just gonna be that's like

Paul J Daly: 9:37

rotating the tech like, like a like a fortnight character. We can do that. All right. Todd's back in and I think we have our audio working. Todd, come on back in. Can you hear us? Yeah. Hi, guys. Oh, we're doing really good. We're doing Where are you today at? That's a beautiful background

Todd Caputo: 9:52

in upstate New York.

Paul J Daly: 9:54

That's right. You told me this is your right down the road kind of short, not too far. Todd,

Kyle Mountsier: 10:00

you are you're close to a ton of dealers, obviously longtime dealer yourself. And you know, yesterday there was just a ton of hustle and bustle around the industry trying to figure out exactly what to do. What's kind of your take your your your hot, take your first take on the CDK interruptions to business and what dealers should be thinking about just first get out the gate.

Todd Caputo: 10:23

I mean, so like, first of all, the worst feeling you can get is a group thread text message at 5am or 6am, saying the DMS is down like I remember those days, right? Especially before customers are coming for your you know, walking into your service drive at seven or 730 in the morning. It's not a good feeling at all. You know, you know, you have to think about jeez, where do you start, like by department? There is a lot I mean, if it's down for a couple hours, it's one thing that's manageable, but for an entire day or two days, or like you said before, you think it's gonna go on even longer. I mean, it the thought of this is really kind of insane. And there's so much to think about, you know, that was one I bust. Paul this morning. I said, Paul, look at right, like, not every dealer has a backup plan for this. I mean, some dealers might like on the coasts that are in hurricane prone areas where they lose power, but the majority of dealers aren't ready. I mean, when I had my dealerships, we were kind of ready. We had extra boxes, or repair orders and extra parts tickets that we kept, like when we converted, you know, way back when, but we kept them just in case for stuff like this. But you know, there's a lot of people that have come into the car business that have never actually written anything with their hand. But they've always they've always typed it in. So you know, I think at the end of the day, there's a huge lesson to be learned from this. And I think this would be great for for the soda community of dealers, and for vendors to like some kind of like group collaboration where you can talk about, geez, what did you do when this happened? My department? How did you handle leads? How did you handle our rows? How did you handle parts? How did you handle accounting? Like, how did you handle everything? Anybody that touches the DMS of the dealership? How did you actually handle it as a dealer? And how did you actually help accommodate it as a vendor? So at the end of the day, you can build some kind of playbook. So if this happens again, number one, you're prepared. And number two, in my opinion, if I was still own dealerships are responsible for them. I'd make sure part of everybody's training is this moment when this actually happens, right? Like, this is what we do. This is what the procedure is, here's the book that you bring out. This is like the DEFCON five, but yeah, like, just in case, because it could probably will happen again. We know it will probably happen again. And our business, this industry is ripe for cyber attacks, and ripe for fraud as well. And it's only going to continue to get worse. Wait huge wake up call.

Kyle Mountsier: 12:57

It's a huge wake up call. And I think, well, first of all, I do want to if you're listening to this, and you're on CDK, and you're just trying to get in, one of the things that could help any cyber attack, get stronger, is trying to log in. So don't do that right now. Yeah, that's like the first layer is like, tell your people don't continue to try to log in until CDK says that's clear. Because that'll that'll help out feed right or info all that stuff. Exactly. Then the next layer of this is yeah, create, start to create the runbook of like, what have you done document every every change that you make over the next two to three days, if you're a CDK dealer and start to put policies in place around this, you know, I feel most for the parts and accounting department because they literally live out of there, right sales has, you know, route one and dealer track and Dr. Tools and marketing has automation stuff outside of outside of the DMS and outside of CDK products, you can spin up a simple CRM or an email group pretty quickly to get leads. But you know, for parts and for accounting, everything is tied to that DMS. So it becomes an extremely manual process to make sure things aren't met missed over the next three days.

Paul J Daly: 14:20

Without a doubt, listen, we're gonna we're gonna get to work we already started. You know, so your suggestion, Todd real early this morning. And we're gonna see if we can pull together some people who have experienced with this or have some systems in place to do like go real old school of Sodor like we did at the very first live streams. Let's see if we get some people together to share best practices, maybe get some resources together that we can disseminate quickly through email list and things like that. Like this is definitely one of those moments where, like dealers can band together and if you're on another DMS and if there's any support you think you can give to your fellow dealers who are on CDK like these are some of the ideas that like we Want to try to unearth because we know like even though dealers are competitors and the right down the street from one another, like we all know what happens, like when when you need help. The dealer next door is helping. Absolutely.

Kyle Mountsier: 15:12

Second bag of sugar. Right. That's the same thing.

Paul J Daly: 15:16

That's right. That's right. Go ahead. Well, we're gonna say, Todd. I think we have some issues with the audio again. Well, if he doesn't come back in, I think I'll go ahead.

Todd Caputo: 15:32

Did I just lose me? Yeah, but here you go. So there's a lesson, you know, we'll something good from this. At the end of the day, when people learn how to do things manually, rather than punching it in. There's a huge learning curve that gets overcome people actually get a better understanding of the business, no matter what they do in the store. And that is, that's a positive right at the end of the day. So like I said, Let's be positive. Like that's the one thing at the end of the day, people are going to learn a lot from this for sure. So if you guys decide to collaborate on this in the future, I'm looking forward to it from an operational standpoint, this is going to be one hell of a day. Yeah, it

Paul J Daly: 16:05

will be for sure. Listen, if you can, or you know, someone who would be a great fit. To help share some of these practices, just send us an email at Crewe at a soda.com We'll get you looped in, check the email list. We'll be sending it out. Go to a soda.com and sign up to make sure you get it when it comes out.

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