Jaguar Land Rover cyber attack was costliest in British history, and the pain isn’t ove
With fears that businesses could go bust and needing materials to restart production, the Government offered a £1.5billion loan to help the situation. However, JLR launched a cash-up-front scheme for its suppliers in early October instead, with help from what was described as an independent “banking partner”.
Now that production has restarted, if you’re considering buying one of JLR’s models, our Buy a Car service has plenty of great Land Rover deals available, we also have a wide selection of used Land Rover models.
JLR cyber attack timeline
On 2 September, JLR confirmed that it was the victim of what it described as a “cyber incident” that occurred on 31 August. In order to mitigate the infiltration, the firm’s IT team immediately shut down its array of online systems, so the various production lines that rely on this type of technology came to a halt.
From the day following the attack, JLR asked more than 30,000 of its factory employees to remain at home. Since then, production across the firm’s sites in Halewood, Solihull, Wolverhampton and abroad has remained at a standstill while the company works with “third‑party cybersecurity specialists and alongside law enforcement” in order to get things back online safely.
The brand began an in-depth investigation into the incident, with a spokesperson saying on 10 September: “Since we became aware of the cyber incident, we have been working around the clock, alongside third-party cybersecurity specialists, to restart our global applications in a controlled and safe manner.
“As a result of our ongoing investigation, we now believe that some data has been affected and we are informing the relevant regulators. Our forensic investigation continues at pace and we will contact anyone as appropriate if we find that their data has been impacted.”
It has yet to be confirmed what data this is.
After six weeks of inactivity in JLR’s factories, production began what was described as a “phased restart” on Wednesday 8 October, beginning in Solihull, Castle Bromwich and Halewood, and then a few days later in plants abroad.
Lessons to be learned
Senior manager of security operations at cybersecurity firm Huntress, Dray Agha, said the incident “highlights the critical vulnerability of modern manufacturing, where a single IT system attack can halt a multi-billion-pound physical production line”.
“Brands must implement and rigorously test segmentation,” Agha continued. “This means creating digital firewalls between critical production networks and other business IT systems.” Doing so “contains an attack and prevents a single point of failure from bringing the entire operation to a standstill”.
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