Breach, Data Security

Third person arrested, bailed in TalkTalk investigation

A 20-year-old man has been arrested in Staffordshire bringing to three the number of people detained by the police in connection with the TalkTalk data breach.

He was arrested and held on suspicion of violating the Computer Misuse Act. He has been released on bail pending further investigation.

Two teenagers were previously arrested as part of the investigation into the loss of potentially millions of TalkTalk customer records. The first teenager to be arrested was described as a 15-year-old boy from County Antrim in Northern Ireland. He was arrested on 26 October and has been released on bail pending further investigation. The second teenager is described as a 16-year-old boy from Feltham, London who was arrested on suspicion of breaching the Computer Misuse Act. He has been bailed pending further investigation.

The investigation is being carried out by the Metropolitan Police cyber-crime unit (MPCCU), the Police Service of Northern Ireland (PSNI) Cyber Crime Centre and the National Crime Agency (NCA).

TalkTalk was attacked on 21 October in a combined DDoS and SQL injection attack which managed to siphon off a significant number of customer records. The company has been  unable to say exactly how many records were lost but insists that the scale of the attack is smaller than initially thought.

It said that fewer than 21,000 unique bank account numbers and sort codes and fewer than 1.2 million customer email addresses, names and phone numbers were taken.

This is the third data breach at TalkTalk this year. The company said in an FAQ that it believes its website is as secure as possible: “We work with world leading security experts and believed our systems were as secure as they could be.” 

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