TalkTalk Cyber Attack Hacker to Serve Four Years

The 2015 TalkTalk cyber attack caused in the United Kingdom by the hacker has recently been sentenced and will be serving four years in the Youth Detention Centre. The TalkTalk cyber attack had caused a loss of £77 million that counts to €86.3 million as the personal details of 157,000 customers were stolen. The accused has been identified as Daniel Kelley aged 22 years has admitted to targeting a minimum of six organizations by threatening to sell their hacked data on the dark web and deep web unless they pay him hundreds and thousands of pounds all in Bitcoin. When the organizations refused to pay him, he sold the data on the dark web.

Daniel Kelly was amongst one of the hackers who have used the software named as “SQL Injection” in order to attack TalkTalk, whose the then chief executive, Dido Harding was subjected to repeated attempt to extortion demanding £80,000 that is €89,715 in Bitcoin in the exchange for the stolen customer data. Investigations have revealed that he has accessed 156,959 account details of which 15,656 accounts were related to the bank account details and sort code numbers. He had sold all the information on a dark web site named dbs4sale. Earlier he had also hacked a college near his hometown in order to take revenge pertaining to not getting admission for the BTECH course as the authorities had denied his admission owing to the fact that he did not have enough GCSEs.

It has been brought to notice that Kelley operated largely through an anonymous browsing network called “The Onion Router” while he had also disguised his IP address making his criminal activities much hard to trace. However, his illegal activities were confirmed through the hidden evidence in his digital devices that included chat logs and Bitcoin accounts.