Police in the United Kingdom have arrested a second individual as part of the investigation into the recent data breach suffered by telecoms company TalkTalk.
According to the Metropolitan Police, the second suspect is a 16-year-old boy from Feltham, a town near London. The teen was arrested on Thursday by detectives of the Cyber Crime Unit on suspicion of Computer Misuse Act offences, and was later bailed.
Investigators searched his residence, along with another location in Liverpool.
Earlier this week, British police announced the arrest of a 15-year-old boy from Northern Ireland in connection to the TalkTalk breach. It’s unclear at this point what role these teenagers might have had in the hacker attack aimed at TalkTalk.
In the meantime, the ISP informed customers that the data possibly obtained by the attackers is not enough to steal money from bank accounts. However, as many experts have warned, the exposed information can be highly useful for social engineering attacks.
That is why TalkTalk told customers that the company will never call or email them asking to hand over sensitive personal and financial information, and it will not ask them to install any software on their computers.
“The number of customers who may have been affected and the amount of data potentially accessed is also smaller than we originally thought,” TalkTalk said on Wednesday.
The attackers might have accessed names, addresses, dates of birth, email addresses, phone numbers, TalkTalk account information, payment card data, and bank details. TalkTalk says account passwords are not at risk, and the credit and debit card numbers stored on its systems are incomplete. According to some reports, the hack was carried out with the aid of a SQL injection vulnerability.
Cybercrime blogger Brian Krebs reported that the stolen data might be up for sale on hacker forums.
Affected TalkTalk customers have been offered free credit reporting services with Noddle and more than 50,000 individuals have already taken the offer, according to the ISP.
Eduard Kovacs (@EduardKovacs) is a contributing editor at SecurityWeek. He worked as a high school IT teacher for two years before starting a career in journalism as Softpedia’s security news reporter. Eduard holds a bachelor’s degree in industrial informatics and a master’s degree in computer techniques applied in electrical engineering.
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