The cyber attack at Jaguar Land Rover has forced it to take IT systems offline and send staff home.
The car manufacturer has instructed employees to stay at home until at least Tuesday. Production has been halted at factories in Halewood, Merseyside, Solihull in the West Midlands, and at its engine manufacturing centre in Wolverhampton.
The company shut down its systems on Sunday 31 August to limit potential damage from the attack. Scattered Spider, the group that hacked Marks & Spencer earlier this year, have claimed responsibility for the attack.
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The group, alongside fellow hackers Shiny Hunters, claim to have obtained customer data after exploiting a similar flaw in JLR’s system, according to a report in the Telegraph.
In a statement sent to employees, JLR said: “Friday September 5 and Monday September 8: the leadership team has agreed that production associates will be stood down and will have hours banked in line with the corridor agreement.
“All colleagues are required to attend work as normal on Tuesday September 9 unless informed otherwise.”
The hack has also affected car sales and dealers, who are unable to order parts and have to manually register vehicles. September is traditionally one of the year’s busiest times for new car registrations.
JLR is now trying to restore its systems and introduce workarounds for systems that are offline.
The hackers are reported to have posted two screenshots showing internal instructions for troubleshooting car charging and internal computer logs, suggesting they have access to internal information.
JLR, which is owned by India’s Tata Motors, said of the attack: “JLR has been impacted by a cyber incident. We took immediate action to mitigate its impact by proactively shutting down our systems.
“We are now working at pace to restart our global applications in a controlled manner. At this stage, there is no evidence any customer data has been stolen but our retail and production activities have been severely disrupted.”
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