There are two major tech dangers that a car dealership faces every day. Each one is completely preventable and will end up saving you valuable time and money – a single incident can cost a business hundreds of thousands of dollars. We’re not exaggerating – dealerships are top targets for cybercriminals because they carry customer Personally Identifiable Information (PII) and handle payments.
Phishing Attacks on Car Dealerships
A social engineering attack known as “phishing” sends fraudulent emails that are pretending to be staff pr vendors so that they can induce employees to reveal sensitive information such as revealing passwords or credit card numbers. A dealership could have the most secure IT environment in the world, but if that environment is not protected by the people that are using the system regularly, it is useless.
Employee training against phishing attempts is incredibly important because, not only do these attacks happen incredibly often, but an employee in accounting could receive a very convincing email from a hacker posing as FedEx asking for credit card information.
In that one moment, your business has been compromised. If somebody in accounting doesn’t know to perform dual-factor authentication on any wire transfers or gift card purchases for the owner. Training against these phishing attempts is key.
Additionally, make sure to do penetration testing on that training to make sure that they understand what’s going on.
Why Invest In Backup and Disaster Recovery?
Backups and disaster recovery are when you’re backing up all your data regularly along with testing that backup to make sure that it works. Backups are a basic way to structure an organization by helping restore information that may have been lost.
With dealerships in Florida facing hurricanes and retailers in California fighting fires, natural disasters can not just affect the physical inventory, but also the valuable data needed to operate the business effectively.
Our customer, Midland Motors, suffered a devastating fire that destroyed most of their dealership. Luckily, because they had invested in proper backups, we were able to help them get up and running in less than a week.
Can your dealership afford weeks of trying to recover lost, damaged, or stolen data?
Setting Up a Car Dealership User Management System
Lastly, having a central domain repository to control and manage all users in the organization is critical to smooth operations. Having a central domain repository to help manage all organizational users will help keep terminated users out and enable you to make changes quickly.
Protecting your dealership from these critical threats is vital to staying nimble and focusing on what really matters – selling cars.
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If you’re not certain that your dealership has the right technical expertise in your corner, contact us. No sales pressure – all we care about is ensuring dealerships are set up for success.