The September cyberattack on Jaguar Land Rover (JLR) is just the latest reminder of how severe and widespread damages from a cyber incident can get. (As if last year’s CrowdStrike outage wasn’t enough.) JLR CFO Richard Molyneux told reporters the incident was “like nothing else I’ve experienced.”
Disruptive and costly data breaches like JLR’s show that cybersecurity is an issue that goes beyond the IT department, according to Felicia Gallagher, a fractional CFO and the founder and CEO of ThreeStone Solutions. She told CFO Brew that “it’s really a financial resilience issue, because you have to protect the revenue, you have to protect the cash flow, and keep operations under pressure.”
Gallagher drew this conclusion from direct experience. She was working in finance at a national food and beverage distributor that sustained a ransomware attack in May 2018 that sidelined operations for a day and a half.
What happened across the pond: JLR’s breach was bad enough that the company halted operations until early October. The British carmaker said the incident cost it $258 million and was a primary culprit behind the $736 million loss in its most recent quarter.
But the…
