THE cyber attack on Jaguar Land Rover is now estimated to have been the most economically damaging hack in UK history.
About 5,000 businesses nationwide were hit by the fallout — costing the country an estimated £1.9billion, according to a report from the Cyber Monitoring Centre.
Ciaran Martin, chair of the CMC’s technical committee, said: “With a cost of nearly £2billion, this incident looks to have been by some distance, the single most financially damaging cyber event ever to hit the UK.
“That should make us all pause and think, and then as the National Cyber Security Centre said so forcefully last week, it’s time to act.
“Every organisation needs to identify the networks that matter to them, and how to protect them better and then plan for how they’d cope if the network gets disrupted.”
JLR stopped production across its three UK factories for more than five weeks from September after being targeted by hackers.
An English-speaking group calling itself Scattered Lapsus$ Hunters claimed responsibility — but it was not clear what data was stolen or what ransom was demanded.
Analysts estimated that the British brand, which usually makes about 1,000 cars a day, was losing about £50million a week from the shutdown.
The firm resumed manufacturing only earlier this month.
The stoppage led to warnings from several JLR suppliers, who said they would face collapse unless trading resumed rapidly or they received financial support.
And JLR was given a £1.5billion loan guarantee by the Government in late September to help it support its supply chain.
The CMC report added that it did not expect a full recovery until January 2026.
It said it classed the hack as a category 3 incident, based on its scale where a category 5 is the most severe.
Recent cyber attacks on retailers M&S and the Co-op, were deemed a category 2.
JLR declined to comment on the CMC report.
