Service Centers: The New Front Line of Automotive Cyber Risk

If you want to understand where the next wave of cyber risk is hitting dealerships, powersports stores, and RV centers, look past the showroom and straight into the service lane. Upstream’s 2026 Global Automotive & Smart Mobility Cybersecurity Report makes it clear: attackers are no longer just targeting vehicles or OEM cloud platforms—they’re exploiting every access point across the mobility supply chain. And service centers are one of the softest targets.

In 2025 alone, ransomware accounted for 44% of all publicly reported automotive cyber incidents, and 68% involved data or privacy breaches.
What’s driving this? A perfect storm of aging service‑lane technology, high‑value data, and increasingly AI‑driven attack paths that move fluidly between vehicles, cloud systems, APIs, and third‑party tools.

Service departments sit at the crossroads of it all:

Yet despite this sprawling attack surface, service centers often receive the least attention from IT teams. They’re busy, revenue‑critical, and full of devices that “just need to work” which means patches, MFA, and access controls (generic logins, multiple users per device) often take a back seat.

But attackers have noticed. Upstream’s researchers tracked hundreds of incidents and nearly 2,000 active threat actors, many now using AI to automate credential theft, exploit backend APIs, and pivot from a single compromised device into dealership‑wide systems.

For dealerships across automotive, powersports, and RV, the takeaway is simple: your service center is now part of your cybersecurity perimeter. Staff training, access control, segmentation, and vendor oversight can no longer be optional. They’re the difference between a routine oil change and a multimillion‑dollar breach.

Matt Vatter

Chief Compliance Officer, Accelerate2Compliance