Jaguar Land Rover cyberattack shows that governments must provide post-incident support

Last month’s cyberattack on Jaguar Land Rover (JLR) could have an economic impact of hundreds of billion dollars, with revenue impacts for JLR potentially exceeding £3.5 billion ($4.7 billion) and the profit impact potentially reaching £1.3 billion. Many will look to these big, headline-grabbing estimates to assess the impact of this major event, but doing so could head-fake the cyber and economic security communities into missing the true vulnerability: hundreds of thousands of workers will be directly affected.

JLR employs more than 30,000 people, with another 200,000 working at the smaller companies in their supply chain. It is arguably these individuals and smaller suppliers – through loss of work, layoffs, and business insolvency – that will struggle the most due to this attack, and yet there seems to be little support for them at this critical time. This echoes the situation following the combined £500m in lost sales sustained by retail giants Marks & Spencer and Co-op this year.

It’s not the corporate losses that are the problem. Even the combined £4 billion in lost sales across JLR, Marks & Spencer, and Co-op pales in comparison to historical cyber economic impacts. Rather, the day-to-day economic security of the workforces affected by cyberattacks – like the one on JLR – could become a far more menacing concern.