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Britain’s largest car manufacturer, Jaguar Land Rover (JLR), was reportedly in the process of securing cyber insurance at the time of its cyber attack.
The car manufacturer, owned by Tata Motors in India, revealed that it had suffered a cyber attack at the beginning of September, announcing that it had shut down its systems to prevent further damage.
“JLR has been impacted by a cyber incident. We took immediate action to mitigate its impact by proactively shutting down our systems,” Jaguar Land Rover said in a recent but undated statement on its corporate website.
“We are now working at pace to restart our global applications in a controlled manner.”
Manufacturing plant staff were told to stay home as operations were brought to a standstill, with the resume date having been extended a number of times.
Now, as originally reported by Reuters, it has been revealed that JLR was in the process of securing a cyber insurance policy through negotiations with Lockton, a global insurance broker.
However, the deal was not finalised, meaning the company was not covered at the time of the cyber attack.
According to the BBC, JLR is suffering losses of roughly £50 million a week.
While the company originally said there was no sign that any data had been stolen by the threat actors, it has since confirmed that data was compromised. It did not provide details as to what data had been impacted.
With concerns that the JLR cyber attack could have major financial impacts, including on other organisations in the supply chain and 104,000 jobs that work in it, the Unite trade union said that government support would be needed to mitigate the damage.
Additionally, Minister of the Department of Business and Trade, Chris McDonald, said he had met with JLR to “discuss their plans to resolve this issue and get production started again”.
“Our cyber experts are supporting JLR to help them resolve this issue as quickly as possible,” he said.
The cyber attack was claimed by the Scattered Spider hacking collective, after the hackers taunted the company on Telegram.
“Where is my new car, Land Rover,” it said.
It is believed that the hackers are blackmailing the manufacturer for money.
Scattered Spider is the same hacking collective believed to be responsible for the cyber attack on M&S, which suffered a four-month outage as a result of the cyber attack. However, this time, Scattered Spider claimed the cyber attack as part of the new hacking supergroup Scattered Lapsus$ Hunters, which is made up of Lapsus$ and Shiny Hunters.
While the cyber attack on JLR could impact the manufacturer for quite some time, car dealerships and repair garages were reportedly still operating, thanks to less dependence on digital systems. The dealerships reportedly were at one point using manual systems and phone calls to do business, and in some cases, using pen and paper.
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