Glasgow-based Arnold Clark Automobiles, Scotland’s biggest privately-owned company, said it is recovering from a cyber attack just before Christmas.

“Late on the evening of 23rd December, the group was notified by our external cybersecurity consultants of suspicious traffic on our network,” said the company.

“Once we confirmed this internally with our own cyber team, we made the decision to bring down our network voluntarily as a purely protective measure, which has resulted in us cutting connectivity to the internet, our dealerships and our third-party connections.

“Our priority has been to protect our customers’ data, our systems and our third-party partners.

“While this has been achieved, this action has caused temporary disruption to our business and unfortunately our customers.

“Our external security partners have now been performing an extensive review of our whole IT network and infrastructure, which is a mammoth task, and they are providing guidance to our IT team on the re-enabling of our network and systems in a safe, secure and phased manner.

“Our showrooms and branches are open and will be able to assist our customers using our temporary systems until we have been able to restore our full systems safely.

“We expect to resume customer vehicle collections later this week and our branches are contacting customers to arrange this.

“Once again, we would like to thank our customers for their understanding and to apologise for any inconvenience this has caused.”