A cyberattack against British car manufacturer Jaguar Land Rover, the country’s largest automaker, has been so catastrophic that it put a dent in the U.K.’s gross domestic product, the Bank of England said.
In its quarterly monetary policy report, released Thursday, the Bank of England said headline GDP had grown by 0.2%, less than it had projected. That slowdown was due to reduced exports to the U.S. and “disruption linked to the Jaguar Land Rover cyberattack,” it said.
The hack against Jaguar Land Rover, which began in August, has proven to be the most economically devastating in British history, said Ciaran Martin, the chair of the technical committee at Cyber Monitoring Centre, a nonprofit that tracks the impacts of cyberattacks on the country.
“What makes this incident so bad is the total shutdown of industrial production. That’s much rarer in cyberattacks than is commonly understood,” Martin told NBC News.
Jaguar Land Rover didn’t respond to a request for comment. The company first publicly acknowledged the attack on Sept. 2, saying that while the hackers didn’t appear to steal customer data, “our retail and production activities have been severely disrupted.” It then took almost four weeks before the company announced it was even close to resuming manufacturing.
In a report on the hack published last month, the Cyber Monitoring Centre found the attack had cost an estimated 1.9 billion pounds ($2.5 billion), surpassing the WannaCry attack of 2017. WannaCry, which the U.S. and U.K. accused North Korea of creating, spread across computers around the world, with the British National Health Service among the biggest victims. Roughly 1 in 5 of the trusts that administer NHS hospitals were locked down through that attack.
Though the Cyber Monitoring Centre said that the specifics of what happened at Jaguar Land Rover are still unclear, the attack’s fallout has been extremely far-reaching, affecting the company’s global manufacturing operations at at least three U.K. plants, as well as car dealerships and a host of smaller companies that supply automotive parts.
“Production lines were halted for several weeks, dealer systems were intermittently unavailable, and suppliers faced cancelled or delayed orders, with uncertainty about future order volumes,” the report found.
The known details of the event are consistent with ransomware, where cybercriminals gain access to a company’s or government’s computer systems and encrypt or threaten to delete them, demanding an extortion payment to make them usable again. Even when victims choose to pay their attackers, it can take weeks or months to restore operations.
Ransomware is one of the most destructive and profitable forms of cybercrime. An analysis published in February by the U.S. Office of the Director of National Intelligence found there had been at least 5,289 attacks in 2024, with some netting tens of millions of dollars in ransom payments.
The British government has not publicly accused anyone of masterminding the hack. A group of hackers who had claimed to be behind a string of other hacks against large British and American companies earlier this year told the BBC in September that they were responsible for hacking Jaguar Land Rover. NBC News was unable to confirm with the group, as their channel on Telegram, the app where they had previously made such claims, has been deleted.
