For all the scary talk about cyberattacks from vendors and industry experts, relatively few attacks are actually devastating. But the Jaguar Land Rover (JLR) attack was.
The JLR breach wasn’t some nuisance attack that cost a few hundred thousand dollars. It completely shut down production for weeks, will likely cost the British economy more than $2 billion and affected as many as 5000 organizations, according to Reuters. Real people lost their jobs.
The U.K. government had to step in with a loan guarantee of nearly $2 billion to keep JLR running.
A nightmare come true
The JLR attack was the nightmare scenario manufacturers knew could theoretically happen. When it actually happened, it sent many manufacturing organizations scrambling to figure out how they could prevent suffering the same fate.
One issue became clear immediately: The supply chain is one of the weakest security links for manufacturers. After all, the JLR attack originated in the company’s supply chain with the compromise of credentials used by third-party contractors.
How are attackers breaking into supply chains? One powerful tactic involves targeting the development tools and processes for software applications that manufacturers and their supply chain partners use.
It might not be the type of attack that brought JLR down, or it might; full details of the origin of the attack are not public. But an important lesson is that if manufacturers and their supply chain partners are not vigilant about making sure software providers use secure development practices, they’re leaving themselves open to the level of attack JLR suffered.
Supply chains in the crosshairs
Attacks on supply chains via software development aren’t new; but they remain powerful and dangerous. Some of the most famous cyberattacks ever committed involved the tactic, including an infamous 2020 attack on SolarWinds, a 2021 attack on Kaseya VSA and a 2023 attack on VoIP provider 3CX.
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