TalkTalk hack: 16-year-old boy from Norwich is fourth to be arrested
Unnamed 16-year-old has since been bailed along with three others
A 16-year-old boy is the fourth to be arrested in connection with the hack of internet service provider TalkTalk.
The boy was arrested yesterday, as detectives from the Metropolitan Police Cyber Crime Unit and officers from the National Crime Agency executed a search warrant at his address in Norwich.
The Metropolitan Police, who are leading the investigation, said that the boy was arrested on suspicion of offences against the Computer Misuse Act. He has since been bailed, pending further enquiries to a date in late March 2016.
It follows the arrests of a 20-year-old man from Staffordshire, a 15-year-old boy in Northern Ireland and a 16-year-old boy in West London last week. All three have since been bailed.
TalkTalk shocked customers last month when it said it had been hacked and that up to four million customers' private details may have been compromised. But the company claims that not all customer details were exposed in the attack - "only" about 1.2 million customer contact details and the bank details - names, account numbers and sort codes - of fewer than 21,000 customers.
The company added that many of the 28,000 credit and debit card details that were taken could not be used for financial transactions, at least on their own. But with 21,000 unique bank account numbers and sort codes also taken, this could still leave thousands of people's accounts vulnerable to criminals.
TalkTalk said that it had contacted major banks to inform them of the affected bank accounts.
The assault on the firm appears to have been a SQL injection attack, perpetrated under the cover of a distributed denial of service (DDoS) attack.