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Disturbing details of a car maker in the UK coming under cyber attack, and being forced to halt work, have highlighted how there have been attempts to hack into The Eye too.
Jaguar Land Rover (JLR) instructed factory staff to stay at home for several days as the giant company grappled with the fallout from the computer attack, which meant it had to take vital IT systems offline.
Production was stopped at car factories in Halewood on Merseyside and Solihull in the West Midlands, as well as at its engine manufacturing centre in Wolverhampton.
JLR, which is owned by India’s Tata Motors, shut down its systems in order to limit potential damage from the cyber attack.
It occurred at what is traditionally a popular time for consumers to take delivery of a new vehicle, with the latest batch of fresh registration plates becoming available on September 1.
The disruption extended well beyond JLR’s own production lines, with its network of parts suppliers also forced to restrict their operations.
Some repair garages have also warned that existing Jaguar or Land Rover owners may face delays if their cars need new parts.
This worrying news comes after Marks & Spencer (M&S) and Co-Op were also struck earlier this year.
As well as disrupting its online business, the hack affected M&S in-store too, leaving shelves bare in the days after it was targeted, and the huge company admitted that some personal customer data was taken during the attack.
Most of the firm’s systems had to be switched off, and without the technology that links stores and warehouses, food went to waste.
The website, through which one-third of M&S fashion, home and beauty is sold, was down for around six weeks.
The stock price dropped by almost 14 per cent in that period, while competitors like Next rallied.
Once most of the business was back up and running, M&S estimated it had lost a total of £300 million in operating profit as a result of the attack, roughly one-third of what it made last year.
No one knows who is behind this latest hit, but in the past fingers have been pointed at criminal gangs, or agencies linked to Russia and China.
We have also suffered unwanted attention.
Our site always used to get a couple of ‘allow requests’ from e-mail addresses with the .ru (Russia) ending, but recently this has increased massively, and at one point there were four or five A DAY!
There has also been a marked increase in online ‘disinformation’ campaigns, which appears to be linked to the cyber attacks.
In the past Viginum, the French foreign-disinformation watchdog, announced it had detected preparations for a large disinformation campaign in France, Germany, Poland and other European countries.
Russia has been at the forefront of internet disinformation techniques at least since 2014, when it pioneered the use of bot farms to spread fake news about its invasion of Crimea.
Viginum said it had uncovered a Russian network of 193 websites which it codenames ‘Portal Kombat’.
Most of these sites, such as topnews.uz.ua, were created years ago and many were left dormant. But over 50 of them, such as news-odessa.ru and pravda-en.com, have been created since 2022.
French authorities think they are ready to be activated aggressively as part of what one official calls a “massive” wave of Russian disinformation.
Viginum says it closely watched the sites over several months, and managers there have concluded that they do not themselves generate news stories, but are designed to spread “deceptive or false” content about the war in Ukraine, both on websites and via social media.
The underlying objective it would seem, is to undermine support for Ukraine in Europe, and according to the French authorities, the network is controlled by a single Russian organisation.
This alarming information will only serve to concern managers at JLR, who just want to get the workers back in, so that production is up and running again.
The Eye know how they feel…
Tomorrow – how during that career of 42 years in journalism, for him it was essential to be up to date with the law, but today this is becoming increasingly difficult as more and more absurd ancient acts are repealed.
