A group of young English-speaking hackers are claiming to be behind the cyber attack which has halted the global production lines of Jaguar Land Rover (JLR).<\/p>\n
The group is bragging about the hack on the messaging app Telegram, sharing screenshots apparently taken from inside the car maker’s IT networks.<\/p>\n
The gang is also responsible for a wave of cyber attacks on UK retailers including M&S in the spring – and are calling themselves “Scattered Lapsus$ Hunters”.<\/p>\n
“Where is my new car, Land Rover,” the hackers – who are thought to be teens – posted to taunt the company.<\/p>\n
The BBC has approached JLR for comment. <\/p>\n
In private text conversations with one of the criminals, who claims to be the spokesperson for the group, they said they are trying to extort the car company for money.<\/p>\n
But the hacker would not say if they have successfully stolen private data from JLR or installed malicious software onto the company’s network.<\/p>\n
The hacker wouldn’t provide any more evidence they are responsible for the hack – and they are known to lie to get attention.<\/p>\n
But two images posted by the group show apparent internal instructions for troubleshooting a car charging issue and internal computer logs.<\/p>\n
One security expert has speculated the screenshots suggest the criminals have access to information they should not have.<\/p>\n
“Based on the information provided by the attackers and open source intelligence, the attack has access to JLR’s internal systems and network,” security researcher Kevin Beaumont said.<\/p>\n
A spokesperson for the Information Commissioner’s Office said: “Jaguar Land Rover has reported an incident and we are assessing the information provided.”<\/p>\n
Car production at sites including the Halewood plant in Merseyside and another in Solihull have been heavily disrupted since the attack was discovered on Sunday.<\/p>\n
Staff have been sent home and JLR has said it’s working to get manufacturing back online.<\/p>\n
The company has not disclosed the nature of the attack.<\/p>\n
“We took immediate action to mitigate its impact by proactively shutting down our systems, it said in a statement. <\/p>\n
“We are now working at pace to restart our global applications in a controlled manner.<\/p>\n
“At this stage there is no evidence any customer data has been stolen but our retail and production activities have been severely disrupted.”<\/p>\n
The hackers chose the name Scattered Lapsus$ Hunters to reflect the merging of various youth-orientated cyber criminals who are all associated with a network called The Com.<\/p>\n
Earlier this year the National Crime Agency warned of the growing threat from cyber criminals in The Com.<\/p>\n
The newly named group is a mixture of hackers who have been part of the groups Shiny Hunters, Lapsus$ and Scattered Spider – all notorious young hacking groups of the last few years that emerged from The Com.<\/p>\n
The Telegram channel used by the criminals now has nearly 52,000 subscribers. The group has been bragging about hacks and sharing incomprehensible in-jokes for days. <\/p>\n
It’s the forth such Telegram channel as previous ones have been closed down.<\/p>\n
Scattered Spider is name of a loosely linked group of hackers responsible for high profile attacks on M&S, Co-op and Harrods in April and May.<\/p>\n
In July the National Crime Agency arrested 4 people in connection to the hacks. <\/p>\n
A 20-year-old woman was arrested in Staffordshire, and three males – aged between 17 and 19 – were detained in London and the West Midlands. All have since been released on bail.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"A group of young English-speaking hackers are claiming to be behind the cyber attack which has halted the…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":112103,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[49,50,51,47,52,48],"class_list":["post-112102","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-headlines","tag-headlines","tag-news","tag-top-news","tag-top-stories","tag-topnews","tag-topstories"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/112102","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=112102"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/112102\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/112103"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=112102"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=112102"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=112102"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}