What Should Business Owners Do in the Face of Cyber Attacks?
Even if they haven’t affected your industry or your business yet, what should you do? Here’s a great article about what to do afterwards from somebody who’s been through it – that’s the automobile industry. You’ve probably heard a lot in the last week or two about the big CDX/CDK attacks that affected 15,000 car dealerships around the country.

Hindsight Learnings from the Automotive Industry
It’s a good hindsight where you can learn from somebody else’s problems. Now, dealerships are looking back and saying, “Woulda, coulda, shoulda.” I wish I did something different in advance of this to keep this from happening to me.

Financial Impact of Cyber Attacks on Car Dealerships
Many of these car dealerships now have been out of business for a week or more. They can’t sell cars, service cars, sell parts, take trade-ins, or even title or register cars because all their computer systems are shut down. How much do you think a car dealership loses on not being able to sell cars for a week?

Monetary Losses and Operational Challenges
If you sell five cars in a day at, let’s say, $40,000 each, that’s a quarter million dollars a day. In a week, you could be $2 million in sales just like that. In a week, right? Service and parts and everything else. So one week could be very expensive for these dealerships. They still have to make payroll, pay their rent, pay all their expenses, their advertising.

Response from the Industry
So what are these dealerships saying now, after the fact? Here’s a great article from Automotive News saying, “Time to go on offense against cyber criminals.” Being a victim shouldn’t be the cost of doing business.

Steps to Protect Your Business
So what do you do? Step number one is to have active monitoring. If you are a business, even if you don’t think you’re in the tech business and are at risk, we saw an article yesterday about builders who may be at risk of cyber attack. You should have active monitoring.

Options for Active Monitoring
You could hire a cybersecurity company that just puts little code on your computers that monitors for hacks. Or you can get it through a cyber insurance policy. Most cyber insurance companies want to help you monitor because they don’t want to have a claim that they have to pay. So they’re going to help catch it early.

Preventing Future Attacks
Most of these attacks are something that takes weeks or months to put together. The hacker will infiltrate your system, put little monitoring codes on your platform, watch your emails, listen to your messages, download all your passwords, and then they’ll attack after a few weeks of gathering information. If you catch it early before they actually launch the attack, you can eliminate the cost of the damages.

Legal and Financial Ramifications
Here’s another reason why you might want to prevent it. In addition to those losses, there’s already lawsuits. What are the lawsuits about? Well, a dealership has already been sued by a customer and an employee. Because the customer says, “My information was put out there in the dark web.” And the dealership employee, it was even a former employee saying, “My payroll records at that dealership were now compromised.”

Liabilities to Consider
You may have third parties that have damages that could sue you as a business. So you want to make sure that if you’re getting cyber liability insurance, you ask your broker to see if it covers third parties. The third parties could be customers, could also be vendors. If you have a vendor that you buy materials from and you order products and order parts every week, if you’re hacked and you can’t pay that vendor, you have to cancel a contract. They could also have a claim against you for losses.

Comparing Risks: Cyber Attacks vs. Other Perils
The probability of one of these cyber attacks happening to your business is much higher than other types of perils like fire or damage to your business from somebody crashing into it, you know, in a car coming off the road. A cyber attack is more likely. It also can do more damage and put you out of business for years.

Business Continuity Considerations
Think about it. If your building burns down tomorrow, God forbid, how soon could you be back in business? Well, you could rent some space down the street, buy some cheap desks, go to Walmart and buy some computers, and somehow put together a skeleton crew within a day or two. A cyber attack, if all your computers are shut down, even if your building is fine, your employees are fine, you may not be able to be in business until that hacker turns you back on. And that could be weeks, if ever.

Final Message and Support
Keep those risks in mind. If you have questions, you can reach our website. We’re glad to be of assistance.