What You Need to Know About Cybersecurity At Your Dealership

No matter where you land on the risk scale, sometimes you just need a second opinion. One set of questions can certainly provide a nice overview, but there’s no substitute for a comprehensive security assessment.

How to Prevent a Cyber Attack in Your Dealership
By implementing foundational securities and critical processes, you can stop or significantly reduce the risk of a breach occurring.

Stage 1: Foundational Security

1. Administrative Access: People with administrative access can create new users and install new software. Non-IT personnel shouldn’t have administrative rights on their device, and IT personnel shouldn’t use an administrative account for routine tasks all the time. How is your organization handling administrative access? Reduce it as much as you can.
2. Data Backup and Recovery: Ransomware attacks are increasing in both frequency and cost. One of the greatest things you can do to respond to ransomware is to have good data backups. Make sure you have good backups in place that are timely and that you test those backups to make sure you can recover the data.
3. Email Gateway Security: More than 90 percent of cybersecurity attacks start with a phishing email. Email and web scanning are critical to that security. You can think of an email gateway as a stoplight. Any emails that come in are stopped and scanned for malicious activity. This technology can protect your organization from a lot of attacks before they even get to users’ inbox.
4. Email Phishing Exercises: Organizations that are successful against cyber attacks often perform email phishing exercises. The exercise sends an email trying to get your employees to click on its contents. If they fall victim, they get to take cyber security awareness training. Continual practice can lead to a significant decrease in fail rate for employees and an increased level of awareness.
5. Endpoint Protection: More attacks take place at a workstation trying to trick the user or deploy software on a workstation. Things are happening at what we call the endpoint. There is now software called endpoint protection. This software is critical because it’s more proactive and able to identify a piece of malware or virus, as well as isolate it.
6. Firewall with Security Services: Dealerships often don’t update their technology, including their firewalls. Older firewalls are limited in what they can look for and how deep they can go into the information systems. If you get a firewall with security services, these next-generation firewalls are much better at isolating issues, pulling out data that is malicious and only letting through things that are safe.
7. Multi-Factor Authentication: This one is particularly important. It’s the idea that there’s more than one thing that identifies your employee to a computer system. Traditionally, you need a password to log in to your computer. That’s single factor and if someone knows that password, they can impersonate you. The multi factor authentication needs at least two things to identify you. This could be a password, fingerprint, pin number, etc.

If you implement multi-factor authentication, you significantly reduce your risk of a data breach by 95 to 98 percent. This will save you a lot of hassle when it comes to security.

Stage 2: Critical Processes

1. Vulnerability Management
• Asset Inventory: You need to know what you have before you can begin protecting it. Get an inventory of your software and hardware.
• Patch Management: Are there patches that need to be applied? Implement a process that automatically updates the software that you have at least once a month.
• Vulnerability Scanning: This is your coverall. Run the vulnerability scans on a monthly or quarterly basis. They will identify if you’ve missed a patch or if you have other issues like misconfiguring a server. There are two ways to do this:
  • Network Penetration Testing: what does our network look like from the outside?
  • Internal Network Vulnerability Scan: what does our network look like from the inside? If I was a hacker who got into your network, what could I exploit? How well could malware be pushed throughout the network and create infections?
2. Incident Response Retainer
• Incident Response Policy: This identifies key stakeholders and the impact analysis. What are the things we need to bring up first if we did have an incident? What’s most important? Who should we be contacting?
• Incident Response Training: You should do tabletop exercises at least on an annually to help your organization walk through what would happen if you got infected with malware. If the CIO or IT Director is on vacation or gone, what do you do and who do you call? Walk through what the response would be and do a debrief afterwards.
• Incident Response Retainer: It’s important to work with an incident response provider who understands your network already. They’ll do an analysis, and you’ll get them approved by your insurer. If there’s an incident, they can come in and hit the ground running. This helps make sure you’re ready and have the right things in place.
3. Training and Awareness
• Cybersecurity Policy: make sure it’s readable and digestible by the people who need to use it. You can work from a template, but it should be tailored to your organization based on your needs.
• Acceptable Use Policy: All users are educated on what their responsibilities are, and they must sign it saying that they’ll abide by the rules in the system.
• Security Training: Sit people down or give them an online training course and help them identify what their roles are when it comes to cybersecurity.

Stage 3: Key Activities

1. Remote Access
   • Encrypted Email: If you send email with sensitive information, you should be looking at an encrypted email solution.
   • Mobile Device Management: Dealerships are now turning toward tablets or mobile devices for sales staff to look up information. we see a lot of dealerships moving towards having pads that salespeople can have to look up information. Mobile devices pose a significant risk to your organization, so it’s important to investigate this.
   • VPN: if you have users who work offsite, put in a VPN (virtual private network) so it creates an encrypted tunnel between their home computer and their network
2. Monitoring
• Monitoring is very complicated. It’s a very difficult thing to do, and it’s incredibly important for organizations to reduce their risk.
• Look into a risk assessment to help evaluate your organization’s best-practices approach, as well as identify your potential risk areas.

Next Steps in Cybersecurity Awareness at Your Dealership

Look over what cybersecurity practices your dealership has currently and figure out where you’d like to start beefing up that security. It can be overwhelming to get started but the guidelines and best practices above can help your organization be as secure as possible and protect yourself from possible attacks.

Cybersecurity is an ever-evolving issue, so do what you can to educate yourself and other people in your organization now and in the future.

Even if you think you’re prepared, it’s always good to get another opinion.

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