Tata Motors JLR cyber-hack cost UK economy £1.9bn: Study

The recent cyber-hack of Tata Motors-owned Jaguar Land Rover (JLR) was on Wednesday designated as the most damaging cyber event to hit the UK, causing a financial hit of 1.9 billion pounds to the economy and impacting over 5,000 businesses.

The Cyber Monitoring Centre (CMC), an independent non-profit that evaluates cyber events in the UK, categorised JLR's “malicious cyber incident” as a Category 3 systemic event on its five-point scale. The luxury carmaker, which has not directly commented on the CMC data, said it was bringing its stalled operations back online in a phased manner.

“The CMC model estimates the event caused a UK financial impact of 1.9 billion pounds and affected over 5,000 UK organisations," the centre said in a statement.

“The modelled range of loss is 1.6 billion pounds to 2.1 billion pounds, but this could be higher if operational technology has been significantly impacted or there are unexpected delays in bringing production back to pre-event levels. This estimate reflects the substantial disruption to JLR's manufacturing, to its multi-tier manufacturing supply chain, and to downstream organisations including dealerships," it stated.

The cyber-attack in late August forced a complete shutdown of production through September across the automotive major's global operations and it is yet to fully resume its pre-hack schedule.