The hack of Jaguar Land Rover, owned by India’s Tata Motors, cost the British economy an estimated 1.9 billion pounds ($2.55 billion) and affected over 5,000 organisations, an independent cybersecurity body said in a report published on Wednesday.

Experts at the Cyber Monitoring Centre (CMC) have analysed the continuing fallout from the hack, which halted the car giant’s production on 1 September for five weeks and caused widespread delays across JLR’s supply chain.

According to the CMC, 5,000 businesses have been affected in total and a full recovery will not be reached until January

According to report, JLR has stopped production across its UK factories for five weeks from September 1 after being targeted by hackers.

The event also led to warnings from distributors that they could collapse without trading rapidly resuming or financial support.

The chair of the CMC’s technical committee, Ciaran Martin, in a statement said: “With a cost of nearly GBP2 billion, this incident looks to have been by some distance, the single most financially damaging cyber event ever to hit the UK.

“That should make us all pause and think, and then – as the National Cyber Security Centre said so forcefully last week – it’s time to act.

“Every organisation needs to identify the networks that matter to them, and how to protect them better, and then plan for how they’d cope if the network gets disrupted.”

The CMC forecasts that more than half of the cost will be shouldered by JLR itself due to lost earnings and money spent on its recovery.

The organisation added that they will not be expecting a full recovery from the incident until January 2026.

It said it classified the hack as a category 3 incident, based on its scale where a category 5 is the most severe.