For the first time in six weeks a handful of vehicles rolled down some Jaguar Land Rover plants on Wednesday, though it is expected to still take time for the British automaker to fully recover from a devastating cyberattack. Headlight.News has more.
JLR has lost production of as many as 1,000 vehicles a week.
Production resumed at several Jaguar Land Rover plants Wednesday, marking the first time the company was able to resume at least partial operations since it was hit by a cyberattack late in August.
Facilities in Merseyside and the West Midlands were to first to resume operations. These include th Wolverhampton engine plant and a battery complex near Birmingham. Some stamping operations were also gearing back up, as were portions of the big Solihull assembly plant.
While other operations, including a plant in Slovakia, are beginning to bring back furloughed workers, JLR officials declined to say how soon they expect to be fully back up to speed after hackers caused damages that ultimately could cost the company as much as $1 billion or more.
The latest news
The cyberattack hit JLR plants in Britain, India and Slovakia.
“This week marks an important moment for JLR and all our stakeholders as we now restart our manufacturing operations following the cyber incident,” Adrian Mardell, JLR’s chief executive, said on Tuesday.
“We know there is much more to do, but our recovery is firmly underway,” he added.
The BBC reported that other JLR operations will “return gradually,” with some observers warning it could be early November before the automaker is fully up and running.
Struggling suppliers
A many as 200,000 workers were impacted around the world.
The cyberattack is believed to be costing JLR as much as 50 million pounds per week, or about $67 million, mostly due to lost sales. The company is believed to produce as many as 1,000 vehicles a day under normal conditions.
Getting back up to that level will require extensive coordination with JLR’s suppliers, experts cautioned. Many of them have had to put their own operations on hold and the situation has been worsened by a cash crunch at Jaguar Land Rover making it difficult to pay its bills.
“Our suppliers are central to our success, and today we are launching a new financing arrangement that will enable us to pay our suppliers early, using the strength of our balance sheet to support their cash flows,” Mardell said. A British emergency loan package is expected to help both JLR and those suppliers.
All told, about 200,000 workers have been impacted by the cyberattack.
More Auto Cyber News
- Hackers Target Stellantis, BMW, JLR, Other Automakers
- JLR Extends Shutdown After Cyberattack
- Cyberattack Cripples Car Dealers Across the U.S.
Automakers in the crosshairs
The BMW attack came through a third-party vendor.
The hit to JLR is believed to be the largest cyberattack targeting an automotive manufacturer yet. But it far from being the only such incident.
BMW is one of the latest automakers to be targeted, in this case by Everest, a notorious cybergang with ties to Russia. On September 14, the hacker group’s blog reported that it obtained “Critical BMW Audit Documents.” A countdown timer gave the Bavarian automaker just a matter of days to meet its demands before the group said a “recording” would be released.
Officially, BMW has said little about the attack but a senior company source, asking to speak on background, told Autoblog that it actually was a third-party vendor whose “system was compromised.” The attack did yield some documents, the BMW official said, but insisted they are of little use, adding that “All systems, including production, are fully operational for us.”
Then, on Sunday, September 21, Stellantis revealed one of its vendors, “a third-party service provider’s platform that supports our North American customer service operations,” had also been hit with a cyberattack. In this case, some basic customer information, including names and contact information, were accessed, Stellantis acknowledged in a statement on its website. But it claims more personal information, including social security and credit card numbers, were not obtained by the hackers.
0 Comments