Auto dealers target of CDK hack: A look at data privacy stocks

CDK Global, a software provider for car dealerships in the US and Canada, was the target of a cyber attack that caused outages for thousands of North American dealerships. Yahoo Finance's Morning Brief team chats about growing cyber concerns as more companies — and investors — are building out data centers, upping the demand for cybersecurity assurances for clients.

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This post was written by Luke Carberry Mogan.

Video transcript

Check today hacks cause a lot of problems, auto retailers across the US and Canada could face days of outages due to back to back cyber attacks this week on CD K Global.

That's a software provider for 15,000 car dealerships in North America.

So why does this matter?

Well, it shows the impact of cyber security on both small businesses but also the broader economy.

And Brad, so many of the guests that have come on, our show have talked about this in the context of the A I rally, which is something that is a little bit less tangible but cyber attacks and cyber security is going to be so critical to watch, moving forward.

These hacks really making that clear as we're hearing reports from small businesses across the country at these retailers saying that they're having to resort to pen and paper.

Some of them proactively shutting down their systems saying that they don't have an estimation of when things are going to be worked out with this cyber incident.

But the kind of swath of the impact of this attack on car dealerships again, just one example, but showing the kind of impact and importance of cyber security and software moving forward.

I'm going to summon a blast from the past name into this chat in Blackberry and they had listed out earlier this year, the most attacked industries in the cyberspace.

Your finance resulting in about 50% of the attacks.

Health care about 20% which is actually an improvement for health care, which used to be the most vulnerable to cyber attacks and cyber threats here.

And then you've got that in third place, followed by the government and public sector.

But all these things considered it, it kind of takes me back to our conversation that we were having on wealth yesterday.

Um really with regard to some of the ETF plays that are potentially out there for investors, especially given the trove of data that is going to be influenced and, and leveraged with regard to these new data centers and the the new cloud landscape because of generative A I and now needing to layer on cyber security at a much larger or multiple type of realm here.

So that's something that we were discussing yesterday just with regard to some of the opportunity within cyberspace or cybersecurity investments, particularly there are two that continue to come to mind for me over the years, I've been tracking CIB are and then H AC K as well.

Those two of the largest cyber security ETF plays that have been out there and most discussed by some of the experts in the industry as well, especially as you see any type of ramp up in spending to be more proactive in protecting consumers data or business data as well here or just grids.

Uh uh I mean, there's gonna be so much more cyber spending uh that is done and there you're taking a look at the first NASDAQ cybersecurity Cibr on your screen right now.

It's down here on the day though.

Yeah, it's interesting because we are seeing some of the cyber names up on the day.

But that could be part of kind of the macro discussion that we were even having with Jared earlier today that the chip sector and software sector tend to move in different directions.

We're seeing a lot of pressure on the chips names this morning, see some upward movement in the software and cyber security space.

You've got Palo Alto moving to the upside up about 1.5%.

You've also got a name like data dog up as well.

So it's interesting to see kind of that upside movement coming from those names given that the cyber security question continues to be a big problem in the overall market space.

I mean, this is just one of several stories that we've heard about over the course of the past year.

Right?

I think about an AT&T hack.

We don't have the final word on what that was, but seems like it was probably a cyber attack.

It's just it leads to this question about the importance of cyber security moving forward.