The 15-year-old Antrim schoolboy was charged with suspicion of Computer Misuse Act offenses over the TalkTalk breach
Scotland Yard has confirmed that a 15-year-old schoolboy from Antrim in Northern Ireland has been arrested on suspicion that he was involved in last week’s TalkTalk website attack.
The schoolboy was arrested at 4.20pm yesterday (26 October) by PSNI detectives working with detectives from the Metropolitan Police Cyber Crime Unit (MPCCU) and he was charged with suspicion of Computer Misuse Act offenses.
This is a joint investigation by MPCCU detectives, the PSNI’s Cyber Crime Centre (CCC) and the National Crime Agency.
A search of the boy’s address is ongoing.
TalkTalk forced to speak out
Last week, TalkTalk CEO Dido Harding publicly stated that a sustained cyberattack was levelled against the telecoms company with personal details of users stolen in the breach.
Among the potential data that had been compromised were customer names, addresses, DOBs, email addresses, telephone numbers, TalkTalk account information and credit card and bank details.
TalkTalk has begun a lengthy process of contacting all of its customers and is offering a year’s free credit monitoring to all customers.
While initial reports suggested that the hacker attack came from a Russian Islamist group, other reports suggested the attack was a distributed denial-of-service (DDOS) attack and that the financial details of customers remained in the UK.
Scotland Yard image via Shutterstock
