Pendragon Group, with more than 200 car dealerships in the U.K., was breached in a cyberattack from the LockBit ransomware gang, who allegedly demanded $60 million to decrypt files and not leak them.
Pendragon owns CarStore, Evans Halshaw, and Stratstone luxury car retailer, that sell brands cars for all budgets, from Jaguar, Porsche, Ferrari, Mercedes-Benz, BMW, Land Rover, or Aston Martin, to Renault, Ford, Hyundai, Nissan, Peugeot, Vauxhall, Citroen, DS, Dacia, and DAF.
Pendragon did not provide many details about the security incident and limited the information to saying that there is no impact on operations.
“We have identified suspicious activity on part of our IT systems and have confirmed we experienced an IT security incident,” Pendragon says in the security announcement.
However, in an interview for The Times publication on Friday, the company chief marketing officer, Kim Costello, pointed to LockBit rasnsomware gang as the culprit and said that the attack happened about a month ago.
According to Costello, the company has been in contact with the hackers and received stolen files as proof of the breach but did not engage in negotiations.
