Jaguar Land Rover cyber attack: car production to restart as Government pledges £1.5 billion

Jaguar Land Rover (JLR) has confirmed that it will begin restarting car production within the coming days following a £1.5 billion commitment from the government in order to protect the automotive giant’s vulnerable supply chain.

Having initially ceased production following a cyber attack on 31 August, JLR said in a statement that “some sections of our manufacturing operations will resume in the coming days”. It is believed that production will first start at JLR’s Wolverhampton plant on 6 October, before gradually recommencing elsewhere over the coming weeks.

It’s also worth pointing out that analysts estimate JLR has been losing as much as £500 million per week while its sites were at a standstill, so the government’s financial intervention – the first of its kind following a cyber attack – will be desperately needed.

This comes after government Business Secretary, Peter Kyle MP, confirmed that the government plans to underwrite a £1.5 billion loan to JLR in order to help it pay its suppliers. Many of these are small firms that rely on JLR, employing 100,000 people nationwide combined and could be at risk of going bankrupt if production doesn’t resume or sufficient financial support isn’t supplied.

JLR cyber attack timeline

On 02 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 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. 

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”. 

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Lessons to be learned

Whether or not JLR pays cash to appease the hackers, this whole incident will inevitably result in huge losses for the British giant, which has already seen a dip in quarterly sales for the first part of 2025 – something that’s been attributed to President Donald Trump’s unprecedented foreign tariffs.

Warning other manufacturers which may become victims of such attacks in the future, Agha said that designing systems to continue core functions even during an attack can help reduce the financial and operational impact.

Furthermore, Agha says, brands “must implement and rigorously test 'segmentation'. [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,” she added.

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