On the first day of September 2025, what should have been a bustling morning for Jaguar Land Rover (JLR) quickly turned into an unprecedented crisis. Staff arriving at the company’s Solihull and Halewood factories, as well as its engine plant in Wolverhampton, were instead told to go home. The culprit? A crippling cyber attack that forced the shutdown of production lines, leaving the company’s global output at a standstill for weeks. According to BBC, the financial toll was staggering—JLR lost an estimated £50 million per week, with over a month’s worth of production wiped out. Although the company, owned by Tata Group, had reported a healthy £2.5 billion profit the previous year, the disruption underscored the increasing vulnerability of even the largest UK businesses to cyber threats.
The JLR incident was not an isolated event. In 2025, a wave of cyber attacks swept across the UK, targeting not just automotive giants but also household names like Marks & Spencer and the Co-op supermarket chain, as well as a key airport systems provider. According to government surveys cited by BBC, a staggering 612,000 businesses and 61,000 charities were targeted by cyber security breaches this year alone. The financial and operational impacts have rippled far beyond the initial targets, threatening the stability of entire supply chains and, in some cases, the very survival of small firms.
The scale of the problem is hard to overstate. Between January and March 2025, the Office for National Statistics reported that 28% of working adults in Britain were engaged in hybrid working—splitting their time between home and the office. This shift, accelerated by the pandemic, has fundamentally changed the landscape of workplace security. As more employees log in from home or public spaces like cafés and co-working hubs, the risks associated with unsecured broadband networks have grown exponentially. Uswitch Broadband, seizing on October’s Cybersecurity Awareness Month, has been on a mission to educate both individuals and organizations about the dangers of lax online security.
Max Beckett, a broadband expert at Uswitch, explained to the press that, “A common mistake among remote workers and small businesses is leaving home routers with default passwords or outdated firmware. Unlike secure office networks, many home or public connections lack encryption, firewalls, and monitoring, making them far easier for cybercriminals to exploit.” Beckett emphasized that these vulnerabilities are especially risky in remote work settings, where personal and professional devices often share the same network. Simple steps, he said, like enabling WPA2/WPA3 encryption, updating firmware, and avoiding public Wi-Fi without a VPN, can make a huge difference in keeping sensitive company data safe.
The numbers back up the urgency. Cyberattacks affected 43% of UK businesses and 30% of charities in the past year, with the average financial cost of a breach now surpassing £10,000 for businesses, according to government data referenced by Uswitch. For large corporations like JLR or Marks & Spencer, the direct losses can run into hundreds of millions. Marks & Spencer, for example, suffered a cyber attack over the Easter weekend in April 2025 that disrupted contactless payments and forced the shutdown of its online shopping—normally responsible for about a third of its business. The BBC reported that this attack, traced to a third-party contractor, was described as “almost like cutting off one of your limbs,” by Nayna McIntosh, a former executive committee member of M&S.
The Co-op supermarket chain faced a similar ordeal when it was targeted by the same group of hackers. The attackers attempted to extort a ransom by infecting the company’s networks with ransomware. Fortunately, quick action by the IT team limited the damage, though not before the hackers lamented to the BBC that, “they yanked their own plug—tanking sales, burning logistics, and torching shareholder value.”
But the consequences of these attacks go well beyond the immediate victims. JLR, for instance, sits atop a vast pyramid of suppliers, ranging from multinational giants like Bosch to small firms with just a handful of employees. When JLR’s production lines ground to a halt, so too did the fortunes of thousands of suppliers—many of whom rely on JLR as a primary customer. In a letter to the Chancellor, the Business and Trade Committee warned that smaller suppliers “may have at best a week of cashflow left to support themselves,” while even larger firms could “begin to seriously struggle within a fortnight.” David Roberts, Chairman of Coventry-based Evtec (a direct supplier to JLR), told BBC, “All of our companies have had six weeks of zero sales, but all the costs. The sector still desperately needs cash.”
The vulnerability of these supply chains is, in part, a result of the “just-in-time” delivery models that have become standard in industries like automotive and retail. As Elizabeth Rust of Oxford Economics explained to BBC, this approach minimizes inventory and waste but requires intricate coordination—making the entire system exquisitely sensitive to disruption. If a cyber attack breaks just one link in that chain, the effects can be catastrophic. Andy Palmer, former chief executive of Aston Martin, noted, “You break one link in that chain and you have no safety. The manufacturing sector has to have another look at the way it tackles this latest black swan.”
So what’s driving this surge in attacks? Jamie MacColl, a cyber expert at the Royal United Services Institute (RUSI), described a shift in the criminal ecosystem: “Historically, this kind of cyber crime… has mostly been carried out by Russian-speaking criminals… But there’s been a bit of a change… English-speaking, mostly teenage hackers have been leasing or renting ransomware from those Russian-speaking cyber criminals, and then using it to disrupt and extort from the businesses they’ve gained access to.” These newer entrants to the scene, he noted, are often motivated by a desire for notoriety as much as financial gain.
With attacks becoming more frequent and sophisticated, experts are calling for urgent action. According to Jamie MacColl, “The cumulative effect of a kind of inaction on cyber security, both from the government and from businesses, is really starting to bite now.” While the government announced plans for a Cyber Security and Resilience bill back in July 2024, its progress has been slow. Meanwhile, the National Cyber Security Centre warned in May that artificial intelligence-based hacking tools are likely to widen the gap between organizations that can keep pace and those left vulnerable.
To combat these threats, Max Beckett and other experts recommend a series of practical steps: secure Wi-Fi networks by removing personal details from the SSID and setting strong passwords; enable WPA2 or WPA3 encryption; use VPNs when connecting via public Wi-Fi; keep all devices up to date with the latest software patches; and use strong, unique passwords for all accounts. As Beckett put it, “As remote and hybrid working remain the norm, securing your broadband isn’t optional; it’s essential for protecting your work.”
The message from experts and industry leaders alike is clear: the risks are real, the stakes are high, and complacency is no longer an option. Whether you’re running a multinational corporation or working from your kitchen table, the era of cyber insecurity has arrived—and only vigilance, investment, and smart habits will keep the digital wolves at bay.
