Production process of Jaguar Land Rover disrupted by cyberattack

A cyberattack has “severely disrupted” Jaguar Land Rover’s production activities. The good news is that there’s no evidence that customer data has been stolen.

In a press release, the British multinational car manufacturer says it has been impacted by a “cyber incident” and that it immediately took action to mitigate the impact of the incident by shutting down its systems.

“We are now working at pace to restart our global applications in a controlled manner. At this stage, there is no evidence that any customer data has been stolen, but our retail and production activities have been severely disrupted,” the automobile manufacturer said in a public statement.

Unfortunately, Jaguar Land Rover isn’t willing to provide further details regarding the incident. As of this writing, we don’t know who’s responsible for the incident, how the attackers got access to the company’s IT systems, or whether they left ransom demands.

According to the BBC, the cyberattack began on Sunday. Employees at the company's Halewood plant in Merseyside received an email saying they didn’t have to come to work on Monday. Other workers, who were already at the factory, were sent home.

A spokesperson for Jaguar Land Rover Netherlands couldn’t say what the attack's impact would be on the dealer network’s systems. “We are investigating, that’s all I can say about it,” the spokesperson told Dutch news outlets.

Industry magazine Autocar reported that Jaguar's system for registering new cars with the government has been taken offline due to the shutdown.

The car manufacturer is the latest British company to be targeted in recent months. Earlier this year, retail chain Marks & Spencer, the Co-op Group, and luxury retailer Harrods were also hit by cyberattacks.

This isn’t the first time Jaguar Land Rover has had to deal with hackers. In March, a threat actor called “fedboy” claimed he had stolen 700 internal company documents containing employee details like usernames, email addresses, display names, and operational time zones.