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Or sign-in if you have an account.The Halewood operations site of Jaguar and Land Rover near Liverpool in Merseyside, England. Photo by Christopher Furlong/Getty Images filesLast August, Jaguar Land Rover’s U.K. manufacturing network went dark. Using stolen credentials, a ransomware group locked down operations at their Solihull, Halewood and Castle Bromwich plants. For more than a month, the lines stopped and deliveries stalled.Subscribe now to read the latest news in your city and across Canada.Exclusive articles from Barbara Shecter, Joe O'Connor, Gabriel Friedman, and others.Daily content from Financial Times, the world's leading global business publication.Unlimited online access to read articles from Financial Post, National Post and 15 news sites across Canada with one account.National Post ePaper, an electronic replica of the print edition to view on any device, share and comment on.Daily puzzles, including the New York Times Crossword.Subscribe now to read the latest news in your city and across Canada.Exclusive articles from Barbara Shecter, Joe O'Connor, Gabriel Friedman and others.Daily content from Financial Times, the world's leading global business publication.Unlimited online access to read articles from Financial Post, National Post and 15 news sites across Canada with one account.National Post ePaper, an electronic replica of the print edition to view on any device, share and comment on.Daily puzzles, including the New York Times Crossword.Create an account or sign in to continue with your reading experience.Access articles from across Canada with one account.Share your thoughts and join the conversation in the comments.Enjoy additional articles per month.Get email updates from your favourite authors.Create an account or sign in to continue with your reading experience.Access articles from across Canada with one accountShare your thoughts and join the conversation in the commentsEnjoy additional articles per monthGet email updates from your favourite authorsSign In or Create an AccountorWhen the accounting was done, the damage was staggering. JLR recorded a $2.81 billion drop in sales and $366.6 million in losses directly tied to the breach. The Cyber Monitoring Centre, an independent U.K. organization that monitors such attacks, estimated the incident could cost the broader U.K. economy up to $3.93 billion and the Bank of England cited it as a factor in the country’s unexpectedly slow GDP growth. Liam Byrne, a U.K. Member of Parliament and chair of the U.K. House of Commons’ Business and Trade called it “a cyber shockwave ripping through our industrial heartlands.”If this is the cost of a classical cybersecurity breach, what happens to industry in the quantum computing era that is rapidly approaching?Get the latest headlines, breaking news and columns.By signing up you consent to receive the above newsletter from Postmedia Network Inc.A welcome email is on its way. If you don't see it, please check your junk folder.The next issue of Top Stories will soon be in your inbox.We encountered an issue signing you up. Please try againQuantum computing will leave anyone unprepared completely exposed to similar attacks. Cryptography, the foundational layer of security that protects everything from bank accounts and health records to defence communication and energy grids, uses complex mathematical equations as locks to fend off attacks from today’s computers in the hands of bad actors. Quantum computers solve the equations in a fundamentally different way. What takes a classical computer many years to crack, a quantum computer will be able to hack in seconds.When quantum computers are online, the cybersecurity being used by both government and industry will be obsolete immediately, jeopardizing our national secrets, financial institutions, businesses’ proprietary information and the personal information of Canadians.If a hack hitting one auto manufacturer cost the U.K. economy almost $4 billion, how much would it cost if a quantum cyberattack ravaged a provincial government’s systems? Or those of an insurance corporation?The good news is that the federal government is aware and has ordered federal departments to prepare frameworks for quantum-safe transition plans. However, their timelines are built on an assumption around quantum emerging as a real threat in 2035. Recent studies, including from Google LLC, suggest the timeline could be as short as 2029, and attackers are already harvesting data and will decrypt it when the capability exists.At the same time, governments need to treat quantum-safe modernization as an investment in digital infrastructure. Done properly, the transition builds cryptographic agility, which is the ability to update algorithms as the threat evolves without rebuilding from the ground up. Upgrading their networks earlier could have saved JLR and the English economy billions.Canada is better positioned than almost any country in the world to lead and benefit from this transition. Three decades ago, Canadian engineers built key technologies that still underpin the security of today’s digital economy. The talent pipeline feeding the global quantum-safe industry runs through Canadian universities. The sovereign companies building the next generation of hardware security modules are here. We are already capable of manufacturing fully quantum-safe Hardware Security Modules — the physical devices that generate, store and protect the cryptographic keys securing each digital network — that are certified to the highest international standard. The solutions are here, they’re ready to deploy and they are no longer optional.What’s missing is a concrete timeline calibrated to the actual pace of development, and a procurement framework that treats quantum-safe cryptographic hardware as strategic infrastructure. South of the border, amendments to the United States’ CHIPS and Science Act aim to reduce reliance on foreign semiconductor supply chains and boost domestic microchip manufacturing, and a recent executive order imposes a hard deadline of the end of 2030 for PQC key establishment and 2031 for digital signatures. A similarly enforceable deadline in Canada is one way to spur domestic production.The JLR breach demonstrated, in the starkest of financial terms, what happens when legacy cybersecurity is exposed to a sophisticated adversary. Those adversaries are currently waiting with bated breath for the quantum era. The question is whether Canada’s government and industries will learn from this attack.Bruno Couillard is co-founder and chief executive of Crypto4A, a quantum cybersecurity company. Kyle Briggs is entrepreneur in residence for the Faculty of Science at the University of Ottawa. 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