DALLAS — When car sales manager Vincent Ferrara started in the business, they did things the old-school way.
"I started with Cadillac in Kansas City. So, here I am with Cadillac 30-something years later," said Vincent Ferrara, "we'd open the newspaper and look for people selling their cars, and we would call them and try to motivate them to come into the dealership and sell us the car. And then, of course, when you sell a car, you have to replace it with something."
Today, his dealership Frank Kent Cadillac of Arlington relies heavily on technology, but now, that has been compromised due to hackers.
Hackers breached their vendor CDK Global, which manages the dealership's customer information software. Vincent says other dealerships are in worse condition.
"Because there are dealer groups now that everything they do from the sales to financing to service department are all with one company with CDK," said Ferrara.
CDK is a software provider that dealerships use for back-office functions. Some dealerships use the company for all of their technology needs.
The company has about 15,000 clients across North America. CDK has not responded to calls or emails from WFAA on Monday about the breach. According to ABC News, the company experience experienced back-to-back cyberattacks last week and shut down its systems out of caution.
"It's kind of an eye-opener to sit back and watch this unfold," said Vincent Ferrara, "I hadn't even thought of something like that happening. And now that it has, it really makes you kind of step back and think, okay, do I want to have one company that handles all of my various reaches to the consumer and how they're able to reach back into me?"
The software breach comes as no surprise to cyber expert Martin Yarborough. He does cyber consulting for businesses, organizations, and companies to help them protect their customers and corporate data and information systems.
Hackers are more than likely to become commonplace in our society according to Yarborough, and he believes we will see more breaches in the future.
"This is just a drop in a bucket right now. This is going on every day in every kind of industry that we have. We even thought that hospitals would be some kind of an unwritten rule not to hack a hospital. But they're hacking hospitals right and left," said Martin Yarborough, "normally they're going after the big software companies to do that. I think it's just something that's going to become commonplace."
Yarborough has a warning, not only for all dealership customers, but also for anyone who shares their personal information with companies that require it to do business.
"Change your passwords," said Martin Yarborough, "Make sure you turn on multi-factor authentication, and that should give you some degree of peace of mind."