Jaguar Land Rover Extends Production Halt

British auto manufacturer Jaguar Land Rover will extend a production pause until late September as it enters its third week of contending with a cyber incident that forced it to shut down assembly lines across the globe.

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Hackers targeted the Tata Motors-owned luxury carmaker on Sept. 1. In a Tuesday update, the company said its newest target for renewing production is Sept. 24.

“We have taken this decision as our forensic investigation of the cyber incident continues, and as we consider the different stages of the controlled restart of our global operations, which will take time,” the company said.

The hack shut down assembly lines in Solihull, Halewood and Wolverhampton in the United Kingdom, as well as other production in Slovakia, Brazil and India. A University of Birmingham business economics academic estimated in widely-quoted figures that if production stays shuttered through September, the automaker will lose more than 3.5 billion pounds in revenue, a figure amounting to 72 million pounds per day, including five million daily in lost profits.

A band of native-English speaking adolescent hackers now known as Scattered Lapsus$ Hunters has taken responsibility for the attack. The group is also behind waves of attacks against airliners, insurers and casinos in the United Kingdom and the United States.

British trade union Unite on Friday said “thousands of workers in the JLR supply chain are at risk of losing their livelihoods.” The union has already received reports of layoffs. “Ministers need to act fast and introduce a furlough scheme to ensure that vital jobs and skills are not lost while JLR and its supply chain get back on their feet,” Unite general secretary Sharon Graham said.

Some Jaguar Land Rover suppliers will almost go bankrupt, predicted Andy Palmer, a one-time senior executive at Nissan and former CEO of Aston Martin, in an interview with the BBC. A large number of small and medium-sized firms supply the automaker but they lack resources to cope with an extended business interruption, the BBC reported.

British Member of Parliament Andrew Mitchell for Sutton Coldfield, whose constituency includes one of the impacted Jaguar Land Rover suppliers, said at least 200,000 workers located in the West Midlands region of England are directly affected by the production shutdown.

Supporters of government assistance for affected works and firms includes Parliament Business and Trade Committee chair Liam Byrne, who in a Thursday letter to Chancellor Rachel Reeves called for a “COVID-style economic support mechanisms” to bail out Jaguar Land Rover suppliers using public funds.

Scattered Lapsus$ Hunters grew from online hacking collective called “The Community,” or “The Com,” members of which have been previously linked to high-profile attacks on more than 130 companies, including MGM Resorts, Clorox and cryptocurrency exchange Coinbase. The group announced its closure on Friday, provoking skepticism among cybersecurity experts who say they’ve spotted evidence of continued attacks carrying hallmarks of the group’s tactics (see: Scattered Spider Tied to Fresh Attacks on Financial Services).

“I think each group will continue to be active in the ways they have traditionally been active,” said Ben McCarthy, lead cybersecurity engineer at Immersive. “I wouldn’t be surprised if we see less of one or two of the groups for a while, but they have tried to make it very clear that law enforcement does not scare them.”