TalkTalk Hack – Teenager Held UK ISP to Ransom for 465 Bitcoins

The Westminster Magistrates Court has heard how 19-year-old Daniel Kelley, who was arrested in Llanelli (South Wales) at the end of last year on suspicion of blackmail, attempted to extort 465 Bitcoins (worth £216K) from TalkTalk following the devastating 2015 Cyber-Attack on their systems.

The attack itself was the result of a combined Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) assault and an SQL Injection exploit against the ISP’s website (here), which ultimately resulted in masses of personal customer and financial data being stolen.

Since then various UK children and adults have been arrested in connection with the hack, not to mention several support agents in India who were working for TalkTalk through their outsourcing sub-contractor Wipro (here).

At the time TalkTalk’s embattled CEO, Dido Harding, confirmed that she had received an email demanding a ransom. “It is hard for me to give you very much detail, but yes, we have been contacted by, I don’t know whether it is an individual or a group, purporting to be the hacker. All I can say is that I had personally received a contact from someone purporting – as I say I don’t know whether they are or are not – to be the hacker looking for money,” said Harding.

Daniel Kelley is accused of carrying out similar attacks and making related blackmail demands against several other companies from around the world (e.g. Zippo), as well as TalkTalk. The Guardian reports that in total he is said to have demanded 593 Bitcoins, which is currently worth roughly £276,000. Overall Kelley faces 14 charges related to blackmail, four computer hacking offences and two fraud offences.

Kelley was formally charged with the offences yesterday, before being released on conditional bail until 10th October 2016 and he has yet to enter a plea.