The late summer cyberattack on Jaguar Land Rover led to a $2.5 billion (1.9 billion pound) financial hit on the British economy and affected more than 5,000 organizations, according to a report released Wednesday by the U.K.’s Cyber Monitoring Centre.
The CMC rated the attack as a Category 3 systemic event on its five-point scale, and officials warned that current loss estimates for JLR — presented in a range of between $2.1 billion (1.6 billion pounds) and $2.8 billion (2.1 billion pounds) — could increase further if production delays continued or the impact on the company’s operational technology proved to be worse than expected.
“With a cost of nearly 2 billion [pounds], this incident looks to have been, by some distance, the single most financially damaging cyber event to ever hit the U.K.,” Ciaran Martin, chair of the CMC Technical Committee, told Cybersecurity Dive in a statement.
Following a grim annual review by British cybersecurity authorities last week, Martin warned that all organizations need to figure out how best to secure their networks and how to address the risks of potential business disruptions.
In its annual assessment, the U.K.’s National Cyber Security Centre warned that companies need to prepare for those risks at the C-suite and board level.
The U.K. has experienced a record 204 nationally significant attacks and 18 highly significant incidents. These include a series of social-engineering attacks against major British retailers earlier this year that caused hundreds of millions in lost sales and other damages.
The attack on JLR, which began in late August, forced the company to halt production for weeks, including at its U.K. facilities in Solihull, Halewood and Wolverhampton. The shutdown disrupted production of about 5,000 cars per week, according to the CMC report.
The shutdown caused a ripple effect across the company’s vast supply chain, including at auto dealerships. Many local businesses also suffered as plant workers remained home.
U.K. officials agreed in September to provide a massive $2 billion (1.5 billion pound) loan package to help support the restoration of JLR’s supply chain.
JLR executives declined to comment on the CMC report, but the company confirmed that it had restarted production at multiple facilities, including Halewood and a site in Slovakia.
