The Tata Motors share price is beginning to go up after its UK subsidiary, Jaguar Land Rover (JLR), announced progress in restoring digital systems that were hit by a cyberattack earlier this month.

In the gleaming assembly halls of Solihull and Halewood, where Jaguar Land Rover (JLR) crafts its sleek predators of the road, a sudden silence fell on September 1, 2025. As widely reported, JLR identified anomalous activity within its systems, necessitating a prompt “shutdown” of its IT infrastructure across manufacturing facilities in the UK, China, Slovakia, and India.

Yes, you read it right. Shutdown. The most dreaded word during the global financial crisis is back. JLR called it a “complex, controlled system recovery process.” The ransomware-driven attack, reportedly linked to the hacker group “Scattered Lapsus$ Hunters,” had forced JLR to halt production, disrupt sales, and delay payments to suppliers, with losses estimated at nearly $2.4 billion. The ripple effect across its supply chain is tremendous, with hundreds of dependent suppliers, especially small and medium-sized businesses, now facing insolvency risks, and some may be forced to shut down operations entirely.

“We have two lives, and the second begins when we realize we only have one.”

Most companies realize this famous Confucius quote only after they are breached, and that is when they pour investments into cybersecurity in a desperate attempt to recover.

Breaches are grueling. Almost every CISO or CIO I have known who has been on the side that got breached has a cost that is never calculated — the toll on the lives of those who endured it. It is therefore paramount to be prepared. If you are in a breach, begin your breach ready journey the day you stabilize the business and put it in a minimum lights-on mode. After all, you have just consumed the first life. Breach readiness helps enterprises anticipate context-relevant cyberattacks by modeling interception and cyber defense and building response procedures to augment.

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And as we learn from JLR and every other breach, breaches are very costly to withstand if you are not proactively ready to handle the effects. The heartening news is that they are building foundational capabilities to recover better.

The advent of the software-defined vehicle (SDV) is revolutionizing the automotive industry, creating a complex ecosystem of interconnected digital systems and extensive supplier collaboration. And SDVs must be breach ready.

Architecting for a Breach Ready Software-Defined Vehicle (BRSDV) future requires a shift toward a centralized compute and zonal architecture in SDVs, providing a foundational capability for effective microsegmentation. This new architecture moves away from a distributed network of Electronic Control Units (ECUs) to a more manageable and breach ready digital business model. This, complemented by a robust cryptographic passwordless multi-factor authentication model, can deny credential misuse throughout the entire digital supply chain, ensuring that supplier access to development, testing, and production environments is strictly controlled based on the principle of least privilege. To reduce the chances of valid user misuse, AI-based deception technologies used on the allowed paths for authenticated users are best suited to detect behavioral anomalies that lure and trap attackers during their initial reconnaissance phase, providing early and high-fidelity threat detection with minimal false positives.

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Let us face it. Increased investments in cybersecurity are not reducing the number of attacks. If anything, they are increasing at an alarming rate. And that is because it is not a symptom to be treated, and our current approach is giving a false sense of order to chaos. As a student of cyber defense, I have realized that cyberattacks are not linear challenges, nor do we possess the knowledge to put them in order. And anything that cannot be attributed to order or reason is like a risk.

It is the effect of uncertainty on objectives.

We sometimes know the objectives and are always witnesses to the effects, but we cannot fathom the uncertainty. This is why all accesses into BRSDVs must be temporary, time-bound, and limited to specific systems, significantly reducing the window of opportunity for an attacker. And as important as it is to microsegment CI/CD pipelines and other crown jewels, it is equally important to build breach readiness in digital industrial systems (OT, IIoT, ICS, CPS) and in delivering OTA updates to the vehicles. The most important breach readiness capability is to ensure continuous monitoring, enabling adaptation to the evolving threat landscape.

Here is a glaring paradox, and probably every technology and risk leader knows it: “As industry becomes increasingly digital and interconnected, so too does its attack surface.” The attackers exploit supply chain dependencies and flat network architectures, leveraging trusted identities and unmonitored network paths to create opportunities for inserting ransomware.

This is not only true for manufacturing but also for most critical national infrastructure, including healthcare and life sciences, energy, transportation, banking and finance, food, water, and agriculture.

Breach ready cyber defense is a proactive, multi-layered zero trust approach to cybersecurity that assumes breaches are inevitable and prepares an organization to contain them, sustain operations, and recover rapidly. Unlike traditional perimeter-focused defenses that aim to prevent all intrusions, breach ready defense emphasizes the continuous evolution of anticipating and containing breaches as essential pillars of security. This methodology places zero trust mechanisms, including microsegmentation and credential defense, at the core while focusing on minimizing material impact and maximizing viable digital business.

Among many wry lessons taught by the history of humankind, the most relevant to cyber defense is: “Empires fall not to barbarians at the gates, but to complacency within.”

The world of automotive innovation and excellence desperately needs to be breach ready.

Schedule a no-obligation consultation with our security advisor and explore how to protect your ecosystem from future threats.

This blog was originally published on Medium.

The post A Breach Ready Software-defined Vehicle Program is the Next New Normal for the Automotive Industry appeared first on ColorTokens.

*** This is a Security Bloggers Network syndicated blog from ColorTokens authored by Agnidipta Sarkar. Read the original post at: https://colortokens.com/blogs/breach-ready-cyber-defense-software-defined-vehicles/