Cyber — CDK
In June 2024, a cyberattack against CDK Global, one of the automotive industry's largest dealer management system providers, disrupted operations at thousands of dealerships across North America.
The professionals of RT Forensic Accountants were engaged by a multi-state luxury automotive dealership group to evaluate the financial impact of the outage and develop a complex business interruption model, separating direct losses from market fluctuations, seasonal incentives, and broader market conditions.
- Industry
- Luxury automotive retailer
- Peril
- Third-party cyber incident
- Coverage
- Dependent / contingent BI
- Result
- Full claim payout within two months of the end of the period of indemnity
The Loss
CDK served as the operational backbone of the business, supporting virtually every core dealership function. The outage cut across sales, service, parts, inventory management, accounting, and customer processing while the doors stayed open.
The Process
RTFA worked with dealership management and accounting personnel to understand how the outage affected operations and performance across all locations, with the objective of a supportable model capturing the economic impact while excluding unrelated market factors.
The Results
Through comprehensive interviews, financial analysis, dealership-level modeling, and normalization of market factors, RTFA built a framework that distinguished outage-related impact from ordinary business fluctuation, leading to a full claim payout within two months from the end of the period of indemnity.