TalkTalk cyber attack: police make second arrest, a 16-year-old boy from Feltham

A second teenage boy has been arrested in connection with the the alleged cyber attack on TalkTalk.

The teenager has been bailed to a date yet to be confirmed.

Officers have also searched a residential address in Liverpool, the Metropolitan Police said.

He was questioned at a police station in County Antrim before being bailed until November. Inquiries by the Met’s cybercrime unit and officers from the National Crime Agency, the British equivalent of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, continued on Friday.

Following the attack on October 22, TalkTalk CEO Dido Harding revealed that she had been contacted by those claiming responsibility for the attack, demanding an £80,000 (roughly $123,000) ransom to be paid in bitcoin, otherwise the company’s customer information would be posted on the dark web.

This follows the arrest and bailing of a 15-year-old in Northern Ireland earlier this week.

TalkTalk shares dropped precipitously after news of the breach was made public, and while the share price has recovered somewhat, the company’s stock is still trading 10 percent down on its price before the attack.

At the time of the hack TalkTalk said its website was hit by a “significant and sustained” cyberattack but was unsure on the exact number of customer details which were compromised.

But it stressed that criminals would need more information to enable them to take money from a customer’s bank account, and said the chances of achieving this was “very small indeed”.

The attack was one of the biggest in Britain and may have led to the theft of personal data from among the firm’s customers who total more than 4 million.