A cyber attack stopped the wheels rolling for an iconic British brand and may have cost it billions.

Live from the UK, this is the Marketplace Morning Report from the BBC World Service.

I'm William Lee Adams. Good morning.

We start here in the UK where experts say the recent cyber attack on Jaguar Land Rover has cost the automaker around $2.55 billion.

That estimate from the Cyber Monitoring Center, or CMC, makes it the costliest cyber incident in the country's history.

The BBC's Joe Tidy joins me now. Joe Hi.

Hi.

How did the CMC arrive at this big figure of $2.55 billion?

Well, they're an independent research group, and they are staffed by some pretty expert cyber researchers.

So they know their onions, and what they've done is they've looked at all the publicly available information,

and they've carried out surveys of some of the impacted people in the supply chain of JLR, and they have done their own kind of industry analysis to try and get this figure. Because of course, JLR hasn't said at all how much this is costing. They haven't said very much at all, actually, about the cyber attack. They've just called it. I think they're still calling it a cyber incident. So there are a lot of kind of caveats which the CMC admit.

So, for example, they are basing it on the idea that JLR will be back to fully functioning, churning out cars in the thousands per week by about January 2026.

And we don't know whether or not JLR is negotiating with the hackers or whether or not they've paid any money to the hackers, which will add on potentially another, you know, tens of millions of dollars on the ransom.

Have investigators figured out who those hackers are?

No, not yet. We have no idea who it is.

But it certainly looks like a criminal attack aiming to extort money out of JLR.

And JLR isn't the only major brand that's had to

cope with a major cyber attack lately. Who else has been affected? There was this wave of high

profile cyber attacks on UK retailers. So there's Markson Spencer, which is a sort of department

store chain and retailer of food.

They've had it the worst of the year, apart from JLR.

So, yeah, it's been a pretty bad year so far for corporations being attacked.

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