Jaguar Land Rover cyber-attack was ‘state-sponsored’, former minister suggests

A cyber-attack which caused up to £2.1bn of damage to Jaguar Land Rover (JLR) last year was state-sponsored, a former armed forces minister has suggested.

Estimated at £1.9bn (ranging from £1.6bn to £2.1bn by the Cyber Monitoring Centre), the cyber-attack was the most economically damaging in UK history. In June, a New York Times investigation linked the attack to a Russian hacking group.

Al Carns, former armed forces minister, made the comments in July at an event at the Chatham House think tank. He was asked about how the UK could deter “threats in the absence of political leadership”, according to a report in The Telegraph.

Mr Carns reportedly replied: “We have all the detail. We know all of the information, we know all of the threats. Sometimes it comes out sporadically, but it’s not a centrally coherent national conversation between government and society.

“We know there is £15bn of cyber-attacks, we know there’s espionage going on, we know there’s 35,000 casualties a month-ish in Ukraine. We know the Jaguar Land Rover attack was state-sponsored, etc, etc.”

Mr Carns told The Telegraph that his comments were not based on an official Ministry of Defence assessment, adding: “It would be highly unlikely for an attack of that scale to emanate from anywhere without the host state knowing about it”.

Jaguar Land Rover had to halt production for five weeks last September after the cyber attack. They were forced to shut down their computer networks, leaving them unable to operate their production lines.

They arranged a war room to fight the hackers comprising of cybersecurity investigators, and representatives from the National Crime Agency, the National Cyber Security Centre, Google and the FBI, according to The New York Times.

Microsoft, who had reportedly been tracking the Russian group responsible, apparently alerted Jaguar to who had breached their systems. The encryption used by the group was described as “really, really complicated”.

MPs have been pushing the UK government to be more transparent about who they believe to be behind the damaging hack. Labour MP Graeme Downie said this Summer that ministers should be more open about the incident “so the British people can see we are already in a conflict with Russia”.

This weekend, defence secretary Wes Streeting warned that Britain must be ready for war in 1,000 days.

Writing in The Telegraph, Mr Streeting warns Britain’s adversaries could be ready to attack the UK in 2030.

He wrote: “Our adversaries’ willingness to harm us is not new. What has changed is their capacity. By 2030 their force strength and war economy could put them in a position to attack.

“That gives us a little over 1,000 days to complete our mission: to be ready with our allies to fight and win.”