Automate car dealer software in United Kingdom

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state university. Geoff: Thousands of car dealers have been forced to revert to pen and paper after a software company they rely on was hit by several cyberattacks. The outage has caused delays and invaccineses and raised major questions about whether data was compromised. >> The company was called C.D.K. Global and provide software systems for 15,000 car dealerships in America and Canada. For all their internal computer systems. We spoke with one dealer in the Philadelphia area -- >> We are writing everything by hand and can't go into our back up systems and see what the warrant costs are or what things are going to cost and it is a manual process that takes a lot longer and sales part of that, that gets even craze year because that has compliance components, such as credit, red flags which integrates into C.D.K. >> Very little has been said who this system and demanding a ran some. Someone helped us. Chris Krebs used to run the federal government lead federal agency and chief intelligence and public policy officer at sentinel one. Can you give us your best understanding what is going on here? >> Thanks for having me on. This is part of a larger surge in ransomware attack. We had united healthcare hit. This is another string in this eastern European and Russian criminal gangs that are hitting U.S. Businesses. My understanding is that C.D.K. Was hit last last week and tried to restore operations and hit by a second attack. That is not unusual and we see that as organizations try to rush back and hurry back to get operations back up and running. They are in the process of containing, which means trying to get the operator out of their network and get safe, secure operations back up to support their customer. >> So this is not an attack on what we would call critical infrastructure. Car sales are slow, but they will eventually pick back up again. You suggest these are criminals who have done this because they are trying to squeeze money out of the company, is that right? >> Absolutely. The unfortunate part of all of this, the amounts that are being demanded by the cyber criminals is only increasing. We are seeing tens of millions of dollars of demands. We have no amount what they have demanded but 20 to 30 million in the average lately. And yet, you know what? This might not be critical infrastructure but it affects us or someone trying to go out there and get a new vehicle if their old vehicle broke down. It is part of a bigger mental attack on the United States and our people. >> I know that there's a lot of debate whether or not paying these are a good idea. Where do youdom down on that argument? >> The unfortunate reeelt, it rewards them. And that's why the United States is getting disproportionately affected by ransom ware. You have it in the united Kingdom and elsewhere and we pay at a higher clip, the bad guys are hitting our businesses pretty hard. I would suggest, though, that we think about this at a higher level where this is not just some random plils. It fits into Russia in the Kremlin's bigger strategy to attack the west and attack the United States. So we are talking about this tonight on TV. So we are experiencing this and being invaccinessed and we are scared of more and more cyberattacks. Ultimately, this does play into Putin's overall strategy. >> Given the amount of these attacks, what is going on here, is it a very hard thing to defend against or companies not taking it seriously? What is the weak link here? >> It's a combination of factors. The three-legged stool of ransom ware. Businesses continue to manage their networks in a way that is not entirely secure that gives the bad guys to come in and it may not be their own fault but the services that companies are using and therefore subject to exploitation. The second is the vulnerable and misconfigured network. They can use cryptocurrency to hold that. They can pull value out and take it to places where the third leg of the stool where they can't be held accountable, eastern Europe and Russia. What are we going to do about this. We need aggressive by law enforcement. We have seen the U.S. Government and United Kingdom go after a group and take them offline. We need more of that. >> Chris Krebs, always good to see you.