Bridgestone and Jaguar Land Rover Hit Hard: The Battle for Business Continuity Amid Ransomware Attacks

Recently, the global manufacturing sector has been hit by a series of significant cybersecurity incidents. On September 2, multiple North American factories of global tire manufacturing giant Bridgestone were affected by a cyberattack, causing short-term disruptions to manufacturing operations. It is worth noting that this is not Bridgestone's first encounter with a ransomware attack. In 2022, the company was targeted by the LockBit group, which severely impacted factory operations.

Around the same time, British luxury car manufacturer Jaguar Land Rover also disclosed a cybersecurity incident that forced it to shut down its global IT infrastructure, bringing production lines to a halt and suspending related retail operations. The BBC, citing sources, described it as one of the most serious cyber incidents to hit UK manufacturing in recent years. A cybersecurity expert told *The Guardian*, "For automotive companies, the production line is directly linked to revenue and market share. Companies would never lightly halt production at major plants unless they feared the attack had penetrated core systems."

Such cases have become commonplace worldwide in recent years: in 2023, Toyota temporarily stopped production at 14 of its plants in Japan after a supplier's system was hacked; Volkswagen and BMW have also exposed supply chain security vulnerabilities affecting multiple global markets. This demonstrates that the high level of automation and digitalization in manufacturing means cybersecurity incidents can rapidly spread to production systems.

These seemingly isolated events collectively sound a global alarm for digital security in manufacturing: ransomware attacks are increasingly targeting core production. From R&D to production, and from supply chains to sales networks, the entire manufacturing ecosystem is exposed to increasingly sophisticated digital threats, posing unprecedented challenges to the industry's digital security infrastructure. A Bridgestone spokesperson emphasized in a media interview: "Maintaining business continuity and protecting data and system interfaces has always been and will continue to be our top priority." This highlights that ensuring the continuous operation of core manufacturing business systems during disasters or ransomware attacks is the primary need.

Every production system interruption not only means direct economic losses but can also lead to broken supply chains, decreased customer trust, loss of market share, and even damage to corporate brand reputation and market position. Especially in high-end manufacturing sectors like automotive production, halting production lines often creates a chain reaction, impacting hundreds of upstream and downstream suppliers and causing global supply chain instability. These two incidents have prompted the global manufacturing industry to re-examine its cybersecurity strategies and business continuity plans. In the wave of intelligentization, manufacturing enterprises must build stronger, multi-layered defense systems.

DatApp Builds a Comprehensive Business Continuity Protection System for Manufacturing

As a leading data security provider, DatApp deeply understands the challenges manufacturing customers face during digital transformation. Leveraging its self-developed innovative technologies, it has built a full-ecosystem, full-stack architecture support system based on data security and business security. This assists users in establishing a practical data disaster recovery application system, enhancing disaster recovery capabilities, achieving second-level RPO and minute-level RTO, and comprehensively ensuring the continuous and stable operation of core businesses.

01. Continuous Data Protection

DatApp's AOB solution is a complete business continuity management suite. Based on IO-level data replication technology, it delivers microsecond-level continuous data protection, providing high-performance, dedicated disaster recovery services including rapid verification at any point in time, quick mounting for use, fast drills, and swift takeover. It serves as a critical guarantee for the continuous online service of core manufacturing systems like order management, production scheduling, ERP, and MES. This solution ensures RPO≈0 for core automotive business systems, creating truly sustainable continuous data protection capability.

02. Comprehensive Data Protection

For the massive data assets in manufacturing, DatApp's Datapp-NBP product offers complete coverage from physical servers and virtualization to cloud-native environments, encompassing databases, virtualization, cloud, big data platforms, capacity, S3 object storage, NAS files, and other application scenarios. It provides an enterprise-grade data protection solution characterized by "Extreme Speed, Boundless Coverage, Intelligence, and Reliability." It enables agentless backup for massive virtual machines and features like instant recovery within the same platform and cross-platform instant recovery to ensure RTO, completing the rebuilding and operation of VMs needing recovery in seconds, thereby minimizing critical business downtime. It also uses distributed parallel processing technology, with a single cluster capable of supporting trillions of data backup requirements.

03. Multi-Associated Business Data Protection

For interconnected business data in manufacturing, DatApp's DGG Database Application Active-Active Management Platform provides real-time data collection from multiple sources, including business systems like ERP and MES. It seamlessly integrates various data formats and source types, ensuring data integrity and consistency. It can also convert data from different sources into a unified format, thereby eliminating redundancy, improving data quality, enhancing data consistency, reducing management costs, and increasing decision-making efficiency, laying a foundation for subsequent data processing, analysis, querying, and extraction.

04. Disaster Integrity and Recovery Availability

Aimed at building manufacturing disaster recovery systems, DatApp's ORDER Disaster Recovery Unified Management Platform covers both data-level and application-level disaster recovery construction. It provides centralized management, monitoring, unified scheduling, plan management, drill and switchover capabilities, and visual large-screen displays for daily disaster recovery management and operations, effectively ensuring business RPO/RTO objectives. Simultaneously, ORDER uses automation technology to discover disaster recovery assets, detect recovery topologies, and organize asset information, significantly simplifying management processes and ensuring a more efficient, intelligent, and operable disaster recovery system.

05. Operations Management System

To ensure the 7x24 reliability of the disaster recovery system and keep it consistent with the production system, the level of operational service determines whether the disaster recovery system can successfully restore operations during a disaster. The DatApp solution provides corresponding operational policies and process management, assisting users in the implementation of disaster recovery management-related systems.

The Jaguar Land Rover and Bridgestone incidents serve as another warning to the global industry: in the face of increasingly frequent and complex cyber threats, no enterprise is immune. Business continuity and data security are no longer just technical issues but are strategic cores related to corporate survival and industry stability. DatApp remains committed to independent technological innovation, deepening industry cooperation, and continuously helping global manufacturing customers build more resilient digital infrastructure, achieve zero business interruption, and construct an impregnable disaster recovery and backup system.