Jaguar Land Rover cyber attack: was customer data stolen?

JLR has admitted that it has been the victim of what it describes as a “cyber incident”, making it one of several large UK firms to be attacked by online criminals over the past six months.

The attack reportedly began on Sunday, with JLR stating that the situation has “severely disrupted” car production; staff were told not to come into work on Monday at the firm’s plant in Halewood, Liverpool, where the big-selling Range Rover Evoque is made.

In a statement, a JLR spokesperson said that once the attack was detected, “[We] took immediate action to mitigate its impact by proactively shutting down our systems. We are now working at pace to restart our global applications in a controlled manner.” 

With September being a crucial month for car sales and production due to the arrival of the new 75 registration in the UK, Auto Express asked the firm how long it would take for production to come back online, but JLR was unable to provide an accurate timescale.

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Nevertheless, JLR instead tried to reassure customers, stating that “At this stage there is no evidence any customer data has been stolen”; it’s likely that the hackers were looking to extort money from the multi-billion pound company, much like what happened earlier on in the year with M&S and Co-op.

While no individual nor group has claimed responsibility for the attack, 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, directly impacting sales, especially during a key period like a new registration month.”

Agha continued, explaining how manufacturers can help protect from attacks such as this by “designing systems to continue core operations even during an attack, which is what likely allowed JLR to prevent a data breach.”

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.”

Regardless of the attack’s impact, it still comes as yet another smack in the face for the British manufacturer following a negative reception to the recent Jaguar rebrand and a 49 per cent fall in quarterly profits due to the damage caused by US President Donald Trump’s wide-reaching tariffs.

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