Cyber Incident Victim: The National

On March 13, 2020, The National, a Glasgow-based pro-independence Scottish newspaper, experienced a cyber attack that forced its website offline for over an hour. The organization's technical team identified unauthorized access attempts disrupting normal operations and traced the attack's origin to China. Staff acknowledged the outage publicly through a series of Twitter updates, confirming the cyber intrusion while providing real-time status reports to readers. No specific technical details about the attack vector—such as malware types, data breaches, or infrastructure vulnerabilities—were disclosed in their communications. The incident occurred during regular operating hours, though the exact start time remains unspecified beyond the confirmed one-hour downtime window prior to their initial social media notification.

The newspaper's response focused on incident containment through technical remediation efforts, though no specific countermeasures were described beyond general restoration work. Operational impacts included complete website unavailability, preventing public access to digital content during the outage. The National maintained transparency by attributing the attack to China-based actors in their public statements, though they provided no evidence or contextual motives for this attribution. No secondary consequences—such as data loss, financial impacts, or reputational damage—were reported. Service restoration timelines remained uncertain during the incident, with staff committing only to resolving the issue "ASAP" without specifying remediation phases or post-incident reviews. The website eventually resumed normal operations following the technical team's interventions, concluding the disruption.