Car dealerships hit with ransomware attack by hackers

a major Cyber attack will have some Auto retailers across Canada and the US out of service for days systems were briefly shut down on Wednesday as a result of the attack it’s still unclear if any customer information or employee data was breached and joining us for more on this is Terry Cutler cyber security expert and founder and CEO of siology labs and good to have you with us Terry Cyber attack in Canada and the US Auto Dealers a few days ago what happened well what’s happening is over the last couple of years there’s been some some consolidation with dealer Management Solutions so there’s less and less of these types of providers so it makes them a very lucrative Target because more and more vehicles are coming online manufacturers are all being interconnected so the so they obviously house a lot of sensitive information so it makes them a very lucrative Target so when they launch these cyber attacks against these these um these large vendors they can hit a lot of potential targets how big was this attack well it affected you know they have over 15,000 dealerships in their database so they got hit with a ransom more attack basically what happens here is cyber criminals get into their Network and by the way the average time that that a hacker is in your system that stays undetected the average time right now is 286 days before being detected so when they when they’re in their systems for that long they can scope out you know what vulnerable systems are in there and potentially siphon out data but eventually what they’re going to do is they’re going to lock up all of this data hold it hostage in exchange for a ransom and these ransoms could be millions of dollars before they’ll give back a key to decrypt all that data wow so how has this affected the industry over the last couple of days well because there’s less and less providers those that are on this particular uh provider that that got hit it grinds to a hall they can’t access their systems everything’s offline so people that want to buy Auto Parts or or schedule maintenance you know it’s it’s unavailable so they’re they’re going to be stuck until these systems come back up online which could take days weeks and in some cases months wow it seems more and more cyber attacks are happening to companies is there more that could be done to protect software going forward yeah there is so a lot of these companies that are being targeted right now are obviously not prepared it’s not a question of if anymore but when and a lot of companies don’t have enough detection technology in place in order as a hacker in your system and don’t have a proper response plan to get the hacker out once he’s been detected so they need to look at more holistic type of cybercity services that’ll monitor their their their internal Network their Cloud providers you know all these ways to get in or or what are called attack surfaces the hackers need just one way in and we as Defenders have to protect every single door and window we’ll say to prevent the hacker from coming in but they just need one way in all right that’s our time thank you for joining today Terry Terry Cutler cyber security expert and founder and CEO of iology laps

Cybersecurity expert Terry Cutler speaks about the cyber attack that targeted car dealerships in Canada and the U.S.

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