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Car dealerships revert to pens and paper after cyberattacks on software provider

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Re: Car dealerships revert to pens and paper after cyberattacks on software provider

#181

Post by [deleted] »

mywittyname wrote: post #72
ethbr1 wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Also, the vendor becomes insulated from customer demands. Why patch things or work your ass off, when none of your customers have an alternative? (especially if PE buys the business or CEOs get a stock price focus and gut engineering to keep-the-lights-on levels)

There's a quiet irony in car dealership networks being fucked like this. They spend so much money ensuring their government-mandated monopoly, only to fall victim to a different kind of monopoly.

[deleted]

Re: Car dealerships revert to pens and paper after cyberattacks on software provider

#182

Post by toast0 »

senthil_rajasek wrote: post #53
vunderba wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's a hell of a purchase to make effectively "sight unseen" without the ability to test drive the vehicle first which you would do at a dealership. The last vehicle I purchased was certified preowned and I went through several models before landing on one - much of my decision was based on how the vehicle handled to me.

We buy so many things "sight unseen" because of the quality and reliability. As an average car consumer, I have done many test drives and gotten nothing out of it except the car salesman looking like he did something. I will buy a reliable car sight unseen like I bought my big screen t.v.

I've been in rental cars that I wouldn't buy based on driving them for 5 minutes. IMHO, a test drive is to confirm the car basically works. Some of the value is just from sitting in the car, but is there any thing terrible going on with steering, visibility, pedal feel, shifting, etc.

For my car shopping, I've usually been locked into a model before I visit the dealer/private party, but if I test drive a car and it drives like some of those rentals, I'd be back to looking at other things. I also just recently test drove a lower trim / different engine/transmission configuration vehicle than I wanted, because that configuration was available to test drive and the desired one wasn't... and I was pleasantly surprised by the drivability, so I broadened my search (helps that the configuration I wanted is more expensive and less produced; it's easier to compromise towards something that I might be able to buy for less)

Re: Car dealerships revert to pens and paper after cyberattacks on software provider

#183

Post by dboreham »

hubraumhugo wrote: post #102
n4r9 wrote: post #13

This is what happens when a single player (CDK Global) has massive market share (90% when measured by number of vehicles sold [0] --- EDIT: this is actually the combined market share of CDK + Reynolds, who have a non-compete agreement ---). The entire industry becomes fragile to product issues and/or malicious attacks. Anti-trust is important. [0] https://casetext.com/case/loop-llc-v-cdk-global-llc-in-re-de...

My entrepreneurial mind immediately thinks: Let's create a better solution to revolutionize this industry and make the old, expensive incumbents obsolete. We can drive to the affected car dealers and migrate them one by one. Of course, I'm not going to do it and it's probably extremely hard :)

At least it's not the healthcare industry...

Re: Car dealerships revert to pens and paper after cyberattacks on software provider

#184

Post by karaterobot »

codemac wrote: post #157
bilsbie wrote: post #12

I think every process needs a paper backup. There’s just no telling when something will be down. If you run a SAAS you could offer this as a feature. Even hire data entry people to input transactions later if needed.

You can price this relatively quickly, and see that it's probably not worth it. ~1 week outage once every ~5 years, let's say you lose 100% of revenue that week, that's 0.38% of revenue. Now most likely they're not losing 100% of revenue, demand for cars is not very elastic... it starts to get pointless all around. Which is frustrating for consumers, but the profit for perfection isn't usually there.

I think you'd have to compare that .38% of revenue to the cost of developing the paper process, as well comparing what revenue you'd lose with the paper process anyway. It doesn't seem crazy to me, unless your paper process is hard to develop.

There's also an argument that developing a backup process is a great exercise to help people understand all the parts of your system and how they interact, as a first step to making them more efficient/redundant/secure/delightful.

Re: Car dealerships revert to pens and paper after cyberattacks on software provider

#185

Post by buildbot »

pjmorris wrote: post #152

For about ten years, I've theorized that we will see the rise of 'boutique' doctor, dentist, and law offices that keep only paper records for the sake of the privacy of their clients. There are a bunch of problems that connection and automation bring with them, the rise of digital monocultures seems to be one of them.

This works until it really doesn't - for example, you are visiting your family 3 hours away from home, slip and fall, go the ER, and die because you are allergic to some random drug but that was only noted in your paper documents. This is a contrived example and allergies to medicine are typically checked on the fly - The point is, you will be at a disadvantage any time your records need to be ported somewhere new.

Re: Car dealerships revert to pens and paper after cyberattacks on software provider

#186

Post by wmf »

hnburnsy wrote: post #126
n4r9 wrote: post #13

This is what happens when a single player (CDK Global) has massive market share (90% when measured by number of vehicles sold [0] --- EDIT: this is actually the combined market share of CDK + Reynolds, who have a non-compete agreement ---). The entire industry becomes fragile to product issues and/or malicious attacks. Anti-trust is important. [0] https://casetext.com/case/loop-llc-v-cdk-global-llc-in-re-de...

Maybe part of the problem is the reliance on the cloud. Will the pendulum ever swing back to on prem?

On-prem is less likely to get patched and it's somewhat more work for the criminals to breach each installation individually but overall it's probably less secure.

Re: Car dealerships revert to pens and paper after cyberattacks on software provider

#187

Post by bcrosby95 »

lotsofpulp wrote: post #124
throwaway55533 wrote: post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> government-mandated monopoly Could you expand on this, aren't U.S. car dealerships private businesses competing in a (mostly) unregulated market?

No, they only exist because state laws prevented manufacturers from selling directly to customers.

So you're saying dealerships are more of a monopoly than manufacturers selling directly to customers?

Re: Car dealerships revert to pens and paper after cyberattacks on software provider

#188

Post by AlexandrB »

tejohnso wrote: post #140
PaywallBuster wrote: post #121

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> direct manufacturer auto sales are prohibited in many states by franchise laws requiring that new cars be sold only by independent dealers. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tesla_US_dealership_disputes not a monopoly per se, but "forced demand"

Doesn't just about everyone hate dealing with a dealership? Shouldn't it be very easy to vote to fix that in a democracy?

I think that's true for tech savvy nerds, but my mom loves her dealership. Part of it might be the experience of leasing vs owning, where the dealership often does maintenance for free during the lease.

Re: Car dealerships revert to pens and paper after cyberattacks on software provider

#189

Post by dragonwriter »

DANmode wrote: post #171
tejohnso wrote: post #140

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Doesn't just about everyone hate dealing with a dealership? Shouldn't it be very easy to vote to fix that in a democracy?

Too bad it's a Republic.

“Republic” (any system in which top-level government offices aren't personal property of the officeholder) and “Democracy” (any system in which government serves and is accountable to the general population—usually through voting on candidates and/or specific policies—rather than vice versa) are not mutually exclusive.

It’s pretty common for modern Western governments to be both of (Democratic, often also Federal) Republic and (Representative, sometimes with minor areas of Direct) Democracy.

Re: Car dealerships revert to pens and paper after cyberattacks on software provider

#190

Post by advisedwang »

iso8859-1 wrote: post #159
ThalesX wrote: post #47

I was involved in the building of the 911 system for my country. When doing that, we had to design it with this in mind. If the system ever fell down, the operators had standard templated papers they would fill, and once the system would be back up they would add the case data back in.

Why say "my country"? There are less than 300 countries world wide, people should know all of them.

Probably because they don't want to say what country they are in, for privacy.
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