Police arrest another teenage boy over TalkTalk hack

TalkTalk
The TalkTalk breach affected some four million customers

Police have made another arrest over the recent major TalkTalk data breach, and it's another youngster who has been picked up in relation to the hack.

According to the BBC, detectives from the Met's Cyber Crime Unit searched a house in Feltham (Hounslow, West London) and arrested a 16-year-old boy.

The move follows the arrest of a 15-year-old boy from Northern Ireland under suspicion of committing offences against the Computer Misuse Act, although he was subsequently released on bail – but he'll be subject to further investigation.

Unsurprisingly, little further information is available concerning either teenager at this point.

Ransom demand

The attack on TalkTalk was a sustained intrusion over a period of time which reportedly affected some four million customers, and the company was also contacted with a ransom demand from an individual or group after the story had hit the headlines.

TalkTalk noted that the hack compromised its website rather than its core systems, and full credit card numbers weren't stored on the site, so any numbers stolen had some parts hidden which should render them unusable.

Customers have still been advised to keep a close eye on their bank account, obviously enough, and TalkTalk has also offered a years' worth of free credit monitoring to guard against potential identity theft incidents.

Darren is a freelancer writing news and features for TechRadar (and occasionally T3) across a broad range of computing topics including CPUs, GPUs, various other hardware, VPNs, antivirus and more. He has written about tech for the best part of three decades, and writes books in his spare time (his debut novel - 'I Know What You Did Last Supper' - was published by Hachette UK in 2013).