Leading Australian car and truck dealership Eagers Automotive said it suffered a significant cyber attack around Christmas that affected daily operations and impacted financial transactions.

Eagers Automotive is one of the largest operators of car dealerships in Australia and New Zealand. Its clients include global car brands such as Toyota, BMW, Nissan, Mercedes-Benz, Audi, Ford, VW, and Honda.

On December 27, the company, in an announcement on its website, said that it was dealing with a cyber security incident and had decided to halt its trading operations until further notice to manage disclosure obligations related to the cyber security incident.

In a separate notice, the dealership said that the cyber incident affected the IT systems and daily operations across dealerships in Australia and New Zealand.

“The outage is currently impacting our IT systems in some operating locations across Australia and New Zealand, but the full extent of the cyber incident cannot yet be ascertained. External experts have been appointed to support our response and an urgent investigation is underway,” it said.

The company has launched an investigation with assistance from third party cyber security experts to understand the scope of the security incident. Also, it has informed the Australian Cyber Security Centre and the New Zealand National Cyber Security Centre.

“Based on investigations to-date, the company is in the process of notifying a small number of individuals identified who may face serious risk of data misuse,” the automotive retailer said in a statement.

Recently, the notorious LockBit 3.0 ransomware group claimed responsibility for the cyber attack on Eagers Automotive and listed the company as a victim on its data leak site. According to a screenshot shared by cybersecurity analyst and security researcher Dominic Alvieri, the ransomware group has given the company a deadline till January 19 to meet its ransom demands, failing which it will publish the stolen data.

In December last year, Japanese automobile manufacturer Nissan announced that its Australia and New Zealand arm suffered a significant cyber security incident that affected the company’ daily operations.

The company said that its priority is to identify whether any sensitive personal data of its customers and clients have been compromised during the incident. The infamous Akira ransomware group claimed responsibility for the cyber attack on the car dealership and said that it is in possession of 100GB of data allegedly stolen from the company.