Jaguar Land Rover’s cyberattack holds an ominous lesson for British businesses
A general view of JLR signage at the Jaguar Land Rover vehicle manufacturing plant in Castle Bromwich on September 30, 2025 in Birmingham, United Kingdom.
Christopher Furlong | Getty Images News | Getty Images
A major cyberattack on Jaguar Land Rover, considered the most expensive security breach in British history, has prompted experts to question whether the U.K. is equipped to handle a rapidly growing cyber threat.
The Cyber Monitoring Centre, a cybersecurity body, recently estimated the hack of Britain’s biggest automaker to have cost the U.K. a whopping £1.9 billion ($2.5 billion), a figure that represents the substantial disruption caused to JLR’s manufacturing.
The company is currently in the midst of a phased restart to operations after the incident forced it to halt production at factories around the world.
“The threat profile is changing,” Edward Lewis, director at the Cyber Monitoring Centre, told CNBC’s “Squawk Box Europe” on Friday.
“What JLR now shows is that things have pivoted quite dramatically, much more towards economic security at an organizational level and national economic security,” he continued. “Let’s make no mistake here … this isn’t just another cyber headline. This was a macro economic event, and a very serious one for the U.K.”
The Department for Business and Trade did not directly respond to a CNBC question on how prepared the government is for this threat.
JLR first reported it had been victim of a “cyber incident” on Sept. 2. As the U.K.’s largest automotive employer, with nearly 33,000 people employees nationwide — and a further 104,000 working across its vast supply chain. Early figures from the company suggest the attack dealt a heavy blow, with wholesale deliveries down nearly 25% on the year in its fiscal second quarter.
On Tuesday, figures from the European Automobile Manufacturers’ Association, or ACEA, showed Jaguar sales to the EU by September year-to-date were down nearly 80% on an annual basis.
That impact is being felt on links all along the value chain. In a survey of businesses across the West Midlands region, the Black Country Chamber of Commerce found that nearly eight in 10 firms were negatively impacted by the cyberattack, with 14% already making redundancies by late September.
The cyberattack also comes amid years of decline for Britain’s car industry, with September’s production figure coming in at the lowest level since 1952, according to the lobby group Society of Motor Manufacturers and Traders.
JLR is such a pivotal player that its plant shutdown was singled out in S&P’s manufacturing PMI release for September, which fell to a six-month low of 46.2, below the 50-mark that separates growth from contraction.
The hack itself is understood to be the work of a criminal gang calling itself Scattered Lapsus$ Hunters: apparently a collaboration between three collectives, including one named Scattered Spider — which the National Crime Agency indicated it was investigating in connection with the cyberattack on British retailers Co-op and Marks and Spencer earlier this year.
A rising threat
The U.K.’s National Cyber Security Centre says cybercrime is on the rise, warning the country faces four “nationally significant” cyberattacks every week. That’s a record, and reflects a surge of more than 100% on previous levels.
In mid-October, the NCSC co-signed a letter with the National Crime Agency and government ministers —including Finance Minister Rachel Reeves — to the leaders of every company in the FTSE 350, calling on businesses to take steps toward protecting themselves from cyberattacks. The group’s message was clear: “Don’t wait for the breach, act now.”
Government attention has also turned to JLR’s parent company, Tata Group, whose subsidiary Tata Motors bought the Jaguar and Land Rover brands from Ford in 2008.
JLR is one of the more than 200 U.K.-based companies which outsources some or all of their IT management to another Tata subsidiary: Tata Consulting Services, with which JLR expanded its partnership in late 2023 to help it “create a simplified and leading-edge IT infrastructure,” in a deal worth more than £800 million.
An aerial view of the Jaguar Land Rover electric propulsion manufacturing centre on September 30, 2025 in Wolverhampton, United Kingdom.
Christopher Furlong | Getty Images News | Getty Images
Other companies in that roster include fellow cyberattack victims Marks and Spencer — which outsourced more than half of its IT team in 2018 — and the Co-op, which did the same for some of its IT roles two years later.
The Telegraph reported on Sunday that Marks and Spencer ended its business relationship with TCS in July in the aftermath of the attack, which TCS denies. “Some current reports are misleading,” a spokesperson for the firm told CNBC, “with inaccuracies including the size of the contract and the continuity of TCS’ work for Marks & Spencer.”
Spokespeople for both TCS and Marks & Spencer confirmed to CNBC that the bidding process for the service desk contract began in January, months before the hack.
Liam Byrne, chair of the U.K.’s Business and Trade Committee, wrote to TCS CEO Krithi Krithivasan in late September asking for information amid British media reporting that the attack on Marks and Spencer was apparently linked to one of TCS’ employees. TCS said there were “no indicators of compromise” within its network — and that the cyberattacks at all three firms took place within those clients’ own systems.
A TCS spokesperson expanded on this letter to CNBC, saying “while in none of these cases did the attack originate from TCS or our networks, our priority has been to help our clients during this period … TCS has reviewed our own networks systems and been able to conclude that the vulnerabilities have not originated from there.”
‘Moral hazard’
JLR says it makes up 4% of all U.K. goods exports. That’s a significant chunk. Therefore, it’s unsurprising that the government scrambled into action to try and support the company and the firms that rely on it to function — with ITV reporting that the U.K. mulled becoming a “buyer of last resort” for those companies, planning to sell components on to JLR once it resumed production.
The Department for Business and Trade wasn’t able to confirm the ITV report, but a government spokesperson told CNBC: “We acted swiftly to provide cyber security expertise and made a loan guarantee available at a critical moment to help stabilise the the situation. We continue to work closely with JLR, the industry and major banks to keep a close eye on the supply chain.”
JLR reportedly didn’t have cyber insurance at the time of the incident, leading some to question the precedent set by — and sustainability of — the government having to step in to prevent catastrophe. CNBC asked the automaker if this was the case, to which a a spokesperson for the firm said it does not comment on commercial matters.
As it happened, the government has said it will partially guarantee £1.5 billion in loans from a consortium of commercial lenders — meaning the taxpayer will only foot the bill if JLR defaults.
But, the Confederation of British Metalforming, which represents many businesses within JLR’s supply chain, called for further long-term support options — saying “the price of saving good companies is a lot cheaper than losing them.”
The Cyber Monitoring Centre’s Lewis told CNBC that while it’s “still a moral hazard if public intervention removes the incentive to invest in resilience,” it’s unlikely any policy “would even have touched the sides of the financial exposure” JLR has experienced.
Lewis said the conversation should focus more on turning resilience into value. “Emphasis can’t be on admonishment … it should be about encouraging a collective national understanding of the scale of this threat, what resilience really means day to day.”
Whether or not markets are getting ahead of themselves over artificial intelligence is a hot topic for investors right now.
Last week, billionaire investor Ray Dalio said his personal “bubble indicator” was relatively high, while Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell described the AI boom as “different” from the dotcom bubble.
For Magnus Grimeland, founder of Singapore-based venture capital firm Antler, it’s clear the market is not overheating. “I definitely don’t think we’re in a bubble,” he told CNBC’s “Beyond the Valley” podcast, listing several reasons.
The speed at which AI is being adopted by businesses is notable compared to other tech shifts, Grimeland said, such as the move from physical servers to cloud computing, which he said took a decade. Added to this, AI is “top of the agenda” for leaders today, he said, whether they’re running a healthcare provider in India or a U.S. Fortune 500 company.
“There’s a willingness to invest into using that technology … and that’s happened immediately,” Grimeland said.
He described the rapid shift to AI as being substantially different from the dotcom bubble of the late 1990s and early 2000s, when unprofitable internet startups eventually collapsed and the tech-heavy Nasdaq lost almost 80% of its value between March 2000 and October 2002.
“What makes this a little bit different from a bubble and makes it very different from dotcom is that there’s really real revenues behind a lot of this growth,” Grimeland said.
OpenAI, the company behind ChatGPT, said it reached $10 billion in annual recurring revenue in June. Annual recurring revenue (ARR) is the amount of money a company expects to make from customers over 12 months.
Antler is an investor in Lovable, a company that enables people to build apps and websites using AI. In July, Lovable said it had passed $100 million ARR in eight months.
Another reason that the rapid adoption of AI is different from the dotcom boom is the speed at which consumers are taking to the technology, Grimeland said. “Think about how quickly our behavior online has changed, right? … 100% of my searches a year ago [were on] Google. Now it’s probably 20%,” he said.
Earlier this month, OpenAI launched its ChatGPT Atlas browser for Mac OS, with shares of Google’s parent company Alphabet falling on the news.
Smaller AI players
While Grimeland said there was a “tremendous” amount of money going to AI-related companies at the “wrong” valuation, these trends happen at the beginning of an investment cycle, he said. “But in the end … The opportunity in this space is so much bigger than the investments being put there,” Grimeland added.
Asked whether there are opportunities for AI startups when large U.S. and Chinese companies currently dominate the sector, Grimeland said the big firms were “being challenged in the way they haven’t for a very long time.” He gave the example of DeepSeek, the Chinese startup that has produced AI models comparable to those from OpenAI.
“Tencent is building great AI, Baidu is building great AI, but that’s not where DeepSeek came from, right?” Grimeland said. “The AI winners of this current platform shift [are] not necessarily those big incumbents.”
As such, there are significant opportunities for smaller AI companies to become big businesses, Grimeland said, flagging firms that have “positive signals,” such as a good founding team, growth in the lifetime value of a customer and a reduction in the cost of delivering a product.
– CNBC’s Dylan Butts, Ashley Capoot, Alex Harring and Jaures Yip contributed to this report.
Alex Karp, Palantir CEO, joins CNBC’s ‘Squawk on the Street’ on June 5, 2025.
CNBC
Palantir CEO Alex Karp took on a familiar target during the company’s earnings call on Monday: His critics.
“Please turn on the conventional television and see how unhappy those that didn’t invest in us are,” Karp said, after the data analytics company reported better-than-expected third-quarter results. “Enjoy, get some popcorn, they’re crying. We are every day making this company better and we’re doing it for this nation, for allied countries.”
Palantir shares are up 25-fold in the past three years, lifting its market cap to over $490 billion and a forward price-to-earnings ratio of almost 280. The stock slipped in extended trading despite the earnings beat and upbeat guidance.
Karp, who co-founded the company in 2003, said Palantir is “going to go very, very deep on our rightness” because it is “exceedingly good for America.”
The eccentric and outspoken CEO has gained a reputation over the years for his colorful — and oftentimes political — commentary in interviews, shareholder letters and on earnings calls. His essay-like quarterly letters have previously quoted famous philosophers, the New Testament and President Richard Nixon.
In Monday’s letter, Karp quoted 20th-century Irish poet William Butler Yeats and argued for a shared “national experience.” He wrote that rejecting a “shared and defined sense of common culture” poses significant drawbacks.
It’s “that pursuit of something greater, and rejection of a vacant and neutered and hollow pluralism, that will help ensure our continued strength and survival,” he wrote.
On the call, Karp pivoted from a discussion of artificial intelligence adoption to fentanyl overdoses in America, a topic he described as “slightly political.”
“I want people to remember if fentanyl was killing 60,000 Yale grads instead of 60,000 working class people, we would be dropping a nuclear bomb on whoever was sending it from South America,” he said.
Karp also commented on the company’s deals with U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement and the Israeli military. Earlier this year, Palantir won a $30 million deal to build ImmigrationOS for ICE, providing data on the identification and deportation of immigrants.
In 2023, Karp had a message for people in the tech industry who have misgivings about his company’s dealings with intelligence agencies and the military.
“You may not agree with that and, bless you, don’t work here,” Karp said at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland.
Palantir, which gets more than half its U.S. revenue from the government, also provided tools to Israel after the deadly Oct. 7 attack by militant group Hamas. In recent years, both Karp and the company have undertaken a fiercely pro-Israel stance.
Following the Oct. 7 attack, Palantir took out a full-page ad in The New York Times, saying it “stands with Israel” and held its first board meeting in Tel Aviv, Israel, a few months later. Karp has said the company has lost employees due to his staunch Israel stance, and he expects more to leave.
“We’re on the front line of all adversaries, including vis-à-vis China, we’re on ICE and we’ve supported Israel,” he said on the earnings call. “I don’t know why this is all controversial, but many people find that controversial.”
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