Cybercrime
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Fraud Management & Cybercrime
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Geo Focus: The United Kingdom
Operations Likely to Be Disrupted for Weeks

British carmaker Jaguar Land Rover on Wednesday said hackers stole “some data” in the cyberattack detected earlier this month.
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The Tata Motors-owned luxury carmaker shut down assembly lines in the United Kingdom, Slovakia, Brazil and India after a Sept. 1 cyberattack (see: Cyberattack Disrupts Jaguar Land Rover Assembly Line).
“As a result of our ongoing investigation, we now believe that some data has been affected and we are informing the relevant regulators,” the company said in a Wednesday update. The company said global outages across its network sill persist. The company is stymied by computer outages in its ability to service cars at dealerships and the attack has made ordering spare parts and registering new cars very difficult.
In a parliamentary briefing on Tuesday, Chris Bryant, minister of state for business and trade, said the U.K. government is “monitoring the situation closely” and is engaging with Jaguar Land Rover “on a daily basis to understand the challenges the company and its suppliers are facing.”
Derek Twigg, member of parliament for Widnes and Halewood, said the hack has put “thousands of jobs in the supply chain at risk” in the country.
Production staff across the world have been told not to report to work at least through the end of this week, reported the Liverpool Echo. Company executives told London’s The Times that restoring systems will require weeks and that full recovery will take even longer.
“I am disappointed that despite the cyberattack happening just over a week ago, which has affected nearly 33,000 direct employees, no statement has been made to Parliament on what actions have been taken to help the company or to prevent future attacks,” Twigg said.
In a blog post on Tuesday, Jonathon Ellison, NCSC Director of National Resilience, urged British businesses to urgently prioritize patching, access management and boundary defenses.
“These measures form a baseline that every organization should meet to guard against the most common cyberthreats,” Ellison wrote.
Following the attack, hacking group Scattered Lapsus$ Hunters – a band of adolescent hackers behind cyberattacks on major British retailers – claimed responsibility (see: Breach Roundup: Scattered Lapsus$ Hunters Behind Jaguar Hack).
The group briefly posted Jaguar corporate data on Telegram last Thursday before deleting it. The hackers have previously been linked to breaches at Marks & Spencer, Co-op and Harrods (see: Retail Sector in Scattered Spider Crosshairs).
Bryant declined to confirm whether Scattered Lapsus$ Hunters is behind the Jaguar attack. “I do not think anybody has come to any secure decisions on that,” he said, adding that the NCSC continues to investigate.
Security experts said Jaguar’s confirmation of data theft and the hacking groups’ claims are “no surprise.”
“This isn’t a surprising update. Scattered Lapsus$ Hunters had been boasting about stealing data from JLR for the last week on their Telegram channel, so an announcement like this was expected,” said Cian Heasley, principal consultant at Acumen Cyber.
“The group is proving to be highly dangerous. Any organizations named in their Telegram chats should investigate breach claims immediately, because, as we are seeing here, a lot of what they say turns out to be true,” Heasley added.
