TalkTalk teen hacker pleads guilty as firm reveals £22m profit jump TalkTalk has unveiled a healthy jump in post-tax profits on the same day a 17-year-old boy pleaded guilty to hacking the British telco. This morning the teenager, who because of his age cannot be named, pleaded guilty at Norwich Youth Court to seven charges under the Computer Misuse Act. He will be sentenced on 13 December, …
@Loyal Commenter
When it's your Grandparents or elderly parents with early Alzheimer's getting these calls or fleeced of savings then you might be a little less Corbyn style self-righteous. You've no idea the distress and worry it causes them.
@Mike 125
Save stupid comments like that for bestgore or liveleak.
From where I'm standing there's one culprit who deserves a good kicking more than a spotty teenager with a bad network probing habit, and that's the big corporation handling all this personal data in a rather haphazard, even cavalier manner. The irony is they've apparently managed to increase corporate profits despite all this, truth indeed, fools do seem to be easily parted from their money.
"The irony is they've apparently managed to increase corporate profits despite all this, truth indeed, fools do seem to be easily parted from their money."
I commented back at the time that it would only be a short term hit. The old saw "there's no such thing as bad publicity" is demonstrated once again. TalkTalk was all over the news for a week or two. People remember that, at least subconciously. But most don't remember why. Brand awareness wins again. Sad, but true.
Corbyn style self-righteous?
I'm sorry if having respect for the basic rule of law makes me some sort of fanatic in your eyes. Personally, I think mob justice and blind vengeance are things best left in our past. Playing the emotive, "think of the elderly Alzheimer's patient" card does nothing to explain how encouraging vigilantism against someone (guilty or otherwise) would prevent this sort of crime from happening. In fact, all it would do is consume police resources protecting innocent bystanders from mobs.
Maybe you should step down from the high horse, take a few deep breaths and consider why we have things like due process, and read up on why the sort of thing that you are suggesting is proven to be a very bad idea.
Here's an example from the Paedo hysteria stoked up by the right-wing press of a few years ago
Street justice for what?
Using freely available hacking tools to get into what should be a secure corporate network? (from what I have read)
I think they should get him to sit in front a bunch of M.P.'s and explain how he's not sure how it happened but he'll do his best to make sure he won't do it again. Then again he's not shagging one, he doesn't supply them from his pig farm and his father probably isn't a lord.
Yes what he did was wrong but the best way to educate people is to show them it is wrong, retribution rarely works you just end up with criminals that are better at hiding their activities and besides what punishment have talktalk had for having such a shit network that these tools work anyway? I mean ffs I've stress tested my own home network with kali surely someone like talktalk would have the common sense to check if they are vulnerable to known threats and basic hacking script kiddie tools?
Name him for mob justice? Douchebag.
The lad needs to be put on a fast track to the IT industry not chastised.
With proper guidance he could be a badass.
If we lock up talent we will just continue to lose it to other countries.
We rely on immigrants in the UK because our best people are all over the world they dont want to be here. Im fairly sure ill jump ship at some point in the future...not for money, but a better standard of living, creative freedom and most of all investment.
Wherever in the world something epic in tech is happening you can be damned certain theres a Brit involved somewhere.
South Korea is bursting with British Engineers.
Google is most likely setting up another massive office with export quality talent spotting in mind.
It was a SQL injection attack, combined with failing to apply a database software patch released 3.5 years earlier, according to the ICO's investigation into the monumental cockup.
They had suffered other SQL injection attacks earlier in the year, but not done much in response apparently.
All pretty shameful IMHO.
No doubt the youths lawyer will claim he has Aspergers syndrome.
It might even be true.
It will be interesting to see what the sentence is. At 17 he is unlikely to have the resources to pay any fine beyond about £10; I hope I am wrong but I suspect that whatever the sentence is it will be insufficient to deter others from trying the same thing against one corporate IT system or another.
The child is just that; a child.
TalkTalk is a major corporation with the legal responsibility to protect data gathered from its customers and the resources to do just that.
TalkTalk was hacked by a child.
In addition to whatever punishment the court sees fit to impose on the child we should see TalkTalk execs including the CIO and CEO in the dock on criminal negligence charges.
.. and don't bother trying to convince me they got justice in the form of a £400,000 fine.
This was committed by minors, 15yrs old:
https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2016/oct/18/teenage-girl-found-guilty-of-murdering-a-mother-and-daughter
Just because they had crap home security doesn't make the perpetrators any less culpable. If a bank has weak security it doesn't justify the crime of bank robbery either. Let's be straight here this was a hack for the financial gain of selling the details and not just poking around in the system looking for UFOs
"The child is just that; a child."
I must say that when I was a child, the worst thing you might get up to was lighting a small bonfire in a field anytime other than on bonfire night (and having the fire brigade turn up to put it out when the neighbours complained), or riding on the pavement on your bicycle (and getting an official caution letter from the police - it happened to me when I was 13), or dropping litter.
Expectations for our children sure have changed a bit since then.
The report I saw says he won't get a custodial sentence anyway. Perhaps the experience will push him towards more positive application of whatever skills he has in future.
The few customers with a clue left Talk Talk. The ones who don't care about security or even understand why they should care suffered an overdose of inertia. It's like a sort of reverse Darwinism where Talk Talk ends up with a customer base of the clueless.
Clue seems to be a substance that is in short supply and that has little reference to the vast majority of the public. ISPs for people who know what they are doing (A&A, Gradwell come to mind) are relatively tiny compared to the ones that sell to people who want someone to give them a pipe that leads to porn.
A&A use TalkTalk Wholesale as a supplier, which is slightly different to being a reseller of domestic services. They also use BT as a wholesale supplier. While TalkTalk's management of its domestic/residential and SOHO customer base is dire, its upstream network management is somewhat better.
There are a number of competing providers of wholesale Internet Access and peering in the UK: A&A have a choice of who they use, and Talk Talk Wholesale provide a good enough service for A&A's needs at present. A&A can change supplier if they find it necessary.
6 month suspended sentence, and pack him off to GCHQ: See if he's more than a script kiddy, and can become a competent spook.
I'm feeling generous - had to help out two retired old ladies that had phone calls claiming to be Talktalk complete with account details, trying to scam them out of Money (One succeeded), so it's only the fact he's a YOLO Kid stopping me from wanting to hit him with a warning to others jail sentence.
Talk Talk seem to be trying hard to drum up customers.
TV ads
Leaflets through doors.
Sales muggers on lots of high streets.
Wonder how expensive in marketing budget those freshly gained customers were.
The sales muggers amused me, I mentioned their dismal security record as part of my not touching it with a bargepole response, and sales mugger spiel was "that was in the past we are the most secure now", to which I gave a reply that good security is not an add on, it needs designing in from the start & the whole corporation needs to have security as a major focus - playing lip service to security is not proper security.
And my final comment is always as TT are a "big" ISP, they are one of those that automatically blocks access to various officially blacklisted sites & I'm anti censorship - if something is actually bad then there are legitimate legal means to get it shut down.
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