Fifteen-year-old boy arrested over TalkTalk hack

TalkTalk CEO's talk of being targeted by 'cyber jihadis' may have proved wide of the mark...

A 15-year-old boy in Northern Ireland has been arrested in connection with the cyber attack against internet service provider TalkTalk last week.

The arrest was made yesterday afternoon by officers from the Police Service of Northern Ireland, working with detectives from the Metropolitan Police Cyber Crime Unit. The boy was arrested on suspicion of having committed crimes under the Computer Misuse Act, and will be interviewed under caution today at County Antrim police station.

The arrest belies claims made last week by TalkTalk CEO Dido Harding that the company had been attacked by "cyber jihadis", who had demanded a ransom of £80,000 in bitcoin.

Following Harding's claim, a message purporting to be from the hackers was uploaded to Pastebin, claiming that they were teaching "our children to use the web for Allah" and that they wouldn't be stopped.

Their message read: "We Have adapted To The Security measures Of The Web...We Cannot Be Stopped. "We have made our tracks untraceable through onion routing, encrypted chat messages, private key emails, hacked servers.

"We will teach our children to use the web for Allah.. Your hands will be covered in blood.. judgement day is soon..."

However, the ease with which a suspect has been apprehended indicates that, instead of being perpetrated by religious zealots, it was little more than a lone script-kiddie making use of a few hacker tools in his bedroom. The attack was accompanied by a distributed denial of service attack, which TalkTalk conjectured was used as a cover for the real attack against its customer database, by means of a SQL injection attack.

In a statement, the FTSE-250-listed company acknowledged the arrest of the 15-year-old boy: "TalkTalk can confirm that we have been informed by the Metropolitan Police of the arrest of a suspect in connection with the cyberattack on our website on 21st October 2015. We know this has been a worrying time for customers and we are grateful for the swift response and hard work of the police. We will continue to assist in the ongoing investigation."