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Jaguar Land Rover extends cyberattack shutdown to four weeks, costing £50m per week

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Jaguar Land Rover (JLR), Britain’s largest carmaker, said it will keep its factories closed until October 1 following a cyberattack earlier this month that has paralyzed operations and rippled across the automotive supply chain. The shutdown, now stretching to four weeks, is costing the Tata Motors-owned luxury carmaker about £50 million ($68 million) per week, according to the BBC.

JLR runs three UK factories producing around 1,000 vehicles a day, including the popular Range Rover and Defender models. The outage has forced many of its 33,000 employees to stay home, while smaller suppliers are also struggling to cope with the disruption.

Adding to the fallout, industry sources told The Insurer that JLR was left without direct cyber insurance coverage, having failed to finalize a deal brokered by Lockton before the attack. The company has declined to comment on its insurance position or on who may be behind the breach.

Government ministers, including Peter Kyle and Chris McDonald, visited JLR on Tuesday to discuss recovery plans. McDonald said the government’s top priorities are “helping Jaguar Land Rover get back up and running as soon as possible and the long-term health of the supply chain.”

The shutdown underscores the UK’s broader vulnerability to ransomware and cyberattacks, which have recently hit major retailers like Marks & Spencer and Co-op, and even disrupted airport check-in systems across Europe. Official figures show more than 40% of UK businesses reported some form of cyber breach in the past year.

S&P Global’s latest survey shows JLR’s stoppage is already weighing on UK manufacturing output. With JLR’s supply chain supporting over 104,000 jobs, the Unite union has warned of potential layoffs and urged government support to protect workers and suppliers.

JLR said it is working on a phased restart plan, though the investigation into the attack continues. “We have made this decision to give clarity for the coming week,” the company said, stressing its focus on minimizing disruption to staff and partners.

M&S Urges Mandatory Reporting of Major Cyberattacks by UK Firms

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Marks & Spencer (M&S) chairman Archie Norman has called for new legislation requiring large UK companies to report material cyberattacks to national authorities. Speaking before Parliament’s Business and Trade Committee on Tuesday, Norman said the current voluntary system leads to significant underreporting of serious breaches.

Citing the April 17 cyberattack that forced M&S to suspend its online operations for 46 days, Norman said the company had since learned of two major cyberattacks on large British firms within the past four months that were never reported to the National Cyber Security Centre (NCSC).

“We believe there’s a big deficit in knowledge,” Norman said. “So I don’t think it would be regulatory overkill to require companies of a certain size to report material cyber incidents to the NCSC within a fixed timeframe.”

While Norman declined to say whether M&S paid a ransom, he noted that the matter was “fully shared” with the National Crime Agency and other authorities. He also revealed that the attack likely involved multiple parties, including the ransomware group DragonForce, believed to be operating from Asia. Media reports have linked the Scattered Spider hacking collective to the breach.

Describing the cyberattack’s mechanics, Norman said it began with a “social engineering” operation. M&S reportedly had no contact from the threat actors for about a week following the breach. The attack is expected to result in an estimated £300 million ($409 million) in lost operating profit.

Norman added that M&S had been “fortunate” to have doubled its cyber insurance coverage last year, though the company expects the claims process to take up to 18 months. The online clothing store reopened on June 10, but click-and-collect services remain offline.

Nick Folland, General Counsel at M&S, told lawmakers that a key takeaway for other businesses was to maintain the ability to operate offline using pen and paper: “That’s what you need to be able to do for a period of time whilst all of your systems are down.”

CEO Stuart Machin previously said that the company expected to be past the worst of the incident’s impact by August.

Norman’s remarks underline the growing push for stronger cybersecurity regulation in the UK, amid rising concerns about corporate transparency and resilience in the face of increasingly sophisticated cyber threats.