A cyber-attack which caused up to £2.1bn of damage to Jaguar Land Rover (JLR) last year was state-sponsored, a former armed forces minister has suggested.

Estimated at £1.9bn (ranging from £1.6bn to £2.1bn by the Cyber Monitoring Centre), the cyber-attack was the most economically damaging in UK history. In June, a New York Times investigation linked the attack to a Russian hacking group.

Al Carns , former armed forces minister, made the comments in July at an event at the Chatham House think tank. He was asked about how the UK could deter “threats in the absence of political leadership”, according to a report in The Telegraph .

Mr Carns reportedly replied: “We have all the detail. We know all of the information, we know all of the threats. Sometimes it comes out sporadically, but it’s not a centrally coherent national conversation between government and society.

“We know there is £15bn of cyber-attacks, we know there’s espionage going on, we know there’s 35,000 casualties a month-ish in Ukraine.…