Jaguar Land Rover’s cyber bailout
Should the government do more to protect business from the ‘cyber shockwave’?
It is now more than a month since a devastating cyberattack on Jaguar Land Rover forced the closure of factories in the UK, India, Slovakia and Brazil, said Jasper Jolly in The Guardian. There are finally signs of recovery: the company, which is owned by India’s Tata Group, is preparing for “a very limited restart of production”. Investors seem sanguine about JLR’s ability to ride out the storm: the Indian-listed shares of Tata Motors have “barely been disturbed” by the crisis. But even if an estimated £2.6 billion “cash burn” isn’t existential for JLR, its army of smaller suppliers, employing some 200,000 in Britain, are more exposed.
Many “had little choice but to shut down immediately”, said Sky News. There have been calls for a Covid-style furlough programme to protect workers. Ministers aren’t touching that, but they have given a £1.7 billion export development guarantee that JLR can use to unlock bank loans. The idea is that the cash will trickle down to support the supply chain. Plenty remain sceptical about that.
‘Moral hazard’
Jaguar Land Rover has made British business history, said Ali Lyon in City AM. The loans aren’t exactly a bailout, but this is “the first time that a company has been granted government support to respond to a cyberattack” – sparking fears of setting a “moral hazard” if ministers now feel obliged to prop up every victim. All the more so, since it emerges that JLR had been dragging its heels about taking out cyber insurance.
The Week
Escape your echo chamber. Get the facts behind the news, plus analysis from multiple perspectives.
Sign up for The Week's Free Newsletters
From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.
From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.
“It beggars belief that management could have left the company so exposed”, given “paralysing hacks elsewhere”, including at M&S and the Co-op, said Jeremy Warner in The Daily Telegraph. And, now that they’ve been caught napping, it “is not up to the taxpayer to support a profitable private company”. Quite right, said Nils Pratley in The Guardian. Cyberattacks have “become a risk of doing business”. The Treasury cannot be expected to underwrite the costs.
‘Suspected weak link’
The Tata board faces plenty of questions, said The Daily Telegraph – not least the role played by Tata Consultancy Services, a subsidiary whose IT helpdesks are “the suspected weak link” in both the JLR and M&S attacks. Yet, clearly, the Government needs to help. The Tories have floated the idea of a reinsurance scheme to protect British business from what Liam Byrne, of the Commons’ Business and Trade Committee, calls “a cyber shockwave ripping through our industrial heartlands”.
It can’t come soon enough, said Wired. The attack has been claimed by Scattered Lapsus$ Hunters, a collaboration between three English-speaking groups. If youthful hackers can have this impact, imagine what a more coordinated and sustained attack from an enemy power might do.
A free daily email with the biggest news stories of the day – and the best features from TheWeek.com
-
‘The nonviolence resulted from the organizers’ message’Instant Opinion Opinion, comment and editorials of the day
-
NY attorney general asks public for ICE raid footageSpeed Read Rep. Dan Goldman claims ICE wrongly detained four US citizens in the Canal Street raid and held them for a whole day without charges
-
Trump’s huge ballroom to replace razed East WingSpeed Read The White House’s east wing is being torn down amid ballroom construction
-
Wikipedia: Is ‘neutrality’ still possible?Feature Wikipedia struggles to stay neutral as conservatives accuse the site of being left-leaning
-
AI: is the bubble about to burst?In the Spotlight Stock market ever-more reliant on tech stocks whose value relies on assumptions of continued growth and easy financing
-
Who are the new-wave hackers bringing the world to a halt?The Explainer Individual groups and nations are beginning to form concerning partnerships with new ways to commit cybercrime
-
Your therapist, the chatbotFeature Americans are increasingly turning to artificial intelligence for mental health support. Is that sensible?
-
Supersized: The no-limit AI data center build-outFeature Tech firms are investing billions to build massive AI data centers across the U.S.
-
iPhone Air: Thinness comes at a high priceFeature Apple’s new iPhone is its thinnest yet but is it worth the higher price and weaker battery life?
-
Google: A monopoly past its prime?Feature Google’s antitrust case ends with a slap on the wrist as courts struggle to keep up with the tech industry’s rapid changes
-
GPT-5: Not quite ready to take over the worldFeature OpenAI rolls back its GPT-5 model after a poorly received launch