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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