The cyber attack on Jaguar Land Rover (JLR) has been assessed to cost between £1.6- £2.1 billion, with researchers at the Cyber Monitoring Centre (CMC) stating the most likely figure is £1.9 billion, making it “the single most financially damaging cyber event ever to hit the UK”.
Production at JLR was halted from 1 September for roughly five weeks, with phased manufacturing restarting this month. Reuters reported that analysts had estimated losses of around £50 million per week during the shutdown, while the British government provided a £1.5 billion loan guarantee to support the company’s supplier base and shore up liquidity across the network.
The CMC, an independent, not-for-profit group that categorises the financial impact of major cyber incidents, said more than 5,000 businesses had been affected across JLR’s multi-tier supply chain, dealer network and local economies. Ranking the event as Category 3 on its five-level scale, the CMC warned the final bill could rise if production is not fully restored to pre-attack levels on schedule.
“With a cost of nearly £2 billion, this incident looks to have been by some distance, the single most financially damaging cyber event ever to hit the UK,” said Ciaran Martin, chair of the CMC’s technical committee and former head of the National Cyber Security Centre. “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,” he added.
The CMC’s modelling attributes more than half of the cost to JLR itself, including lost earnings and recovery expenses, with the remainder borne by suppliers and downstream businesses. Its estimate does not include any potential ransom payment. Researchers noted they are working on assumptions because JLR has not publicly detailed the nature of the attack, and said the recovery path would differ depending on whether the incident involved data theft and extortion, ransomware or destructive “wiper” malware.
JLR declined to comment on the CMC’s analysis but said it is bringing portions of manufacturing back online in a phased approach. The luxury carmaker operates three UK plants and typically produces around 1,000 vehicles per day. The CMC expects a full recovery only by January 2026.
Earlier this year, the CMC classified a wave of retail breaches affecting Marks & Spencer and the Co-Op as Category 2, estimating a combined cost between £270 million and £440 million.
