The Expert Podcast

So this CDK attack that you may have heard about, uh, maybe not by name, that's hitting all the car dealerships is a very good lesson for any business owner. According to CNN, this auto dealers outage could be a new normal for cyber attacks. What's normal about it that's new? Well, first of all, it's shutting down businesses for days and actually, in some cases, for weeks. So gone are the days where you have a hack and you can just fix it quickly. These hackers are now shutting down companies for days or weeks. This dealership attack has been going on for more than a week and it's supposed to be another week until it's fixed, if at all.

What is that creating for problems for the businesses? Well, one of the things that they're starting to see is paperwork piling up at the dealerships. Dealerships can no longer do electronic car sales registration services. Like normally, you go into the service department to get your car fixed and they type it on a computer and print it out. They have to do everything by hand. What they're going to have to do at the end of that two or three weeks is take all the paperwork they filled in by hand with pen and paper and type it into a computer. That's going to be a big deal. It's going to be more work again than, and some of it's going to be an error.

Now, you might say, "I'm not in a dealership, I'm in a different business." Well, guess what? Think the outrage outages for dealerships. Think again. This is CNN Business. Every type of business is vulnerable to this. In fact, in this particular case, dealerships aren't the companies that got hacked. It was a provider of database services for dealerships, and that company got hacked, and all of the clients for that company, CDK, are dealerships. They're now shut down.

Think of a platform you use, even if it's Google Docs or some CRM or some industry-specific tool for your type of business. You will be back in your video in just a few seconds. In the meantime, remember that ActualHuman.com offers you live one-on-one private video consultations with an expert in this exact subject. We want to listen to your story, we want to hear your questions, we want to give you expert advisement on your options, and tell you what we know about your particular situation. Now, back to your video.

Business platforms that sell to all your competitors, maybe it's something that helps do sales leads, maybe it's something that does paperwork, maybe it's a platform that does inventory management. Any type of platform, if that company gets hacked, what would you be able to do without that resource? And how long could you stay in business without that resource? It might not even be you that gets hacked, it might be somebody else.

So these hacks are getting more and more common, more and more ubiquitous, and it's going to spread outside the dealership. This is why they say that it's critical for companies to have contingency planning. What if? You've got to think about what if. Imagine every single platform, technology you use every single day in your business. What would happen if one of them went away?

What about your merchant account that you use for charging credit cards? Maybe you use Authorize.Net or Elavon or one of these companies. They're all good companies, I'm not saying there's anything wrong with them, but what if you use one of them and they go down? How are you going to bill your customers? Do you have a backup? Do you have old school pen and paper to do something? Think of every critical chain in your sales process and imagine what would happen if one of those links went away.

How would you survive? How would you adapt? How would you pivot to still do business? Because you've got to remember, your employees still need to get paid. You need payroll money. All your vendors need to get paid. Your rent needs to get paid. They're not going to want to hear you say, "Well, we got shut down because we got hacked or one of our clients got hacked." Make sure you have contingency planning.

For more cybersecurity information, check out our website below. We have consulting, we have services, we have insurance, we have all kinds of options for you that will help you sleep better at night, not worrying about being out of business for a week and not knowing where you're going to replace that money from. Thank you for watching another video at ActualHuman.com and Describe.TV. Remember, if you have questions or comments about our videos, put them in the link below.

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