A teenager has pleaded guilty to seven counts of hacking, two of which stem from the TalkTalk data breach in October 2015.
The teenager, whose name has not been released for legal reasons, pleaded guilty to all seven offences at Norwich Juvenile Court. He targeted the websites of Cambridge and Manchester universities before using the hacking tool to exploit vulnerabilities in TalkTalk.
He published details of the hack online, costing TalkTalk $60 million, affecting 157,000 customers, with their details stolen, including bank account numbers, password types and dates of birth. And worst of all, the CEO was blackmailed via email.
He is also on trial on December 13 for the Manchester and Cambridge University libraries cases, among many others. According to Sky News, he told the court: "I wasn't really thinking about the consequences at the time, I was just showing off to my friends.".
Chris Brown, who is the teenager's lawyer, told the court that the vulnerabilities in the company's site had been discussed before and were not solely the defendant's fault - "what happened at TalkTalk is entirely their fault.".
“The vulnerability was discovered after the teenager by someone else who found another way to hack the business,” Brown said. “Their customer database was seized, customers were threatened with demands for money to keep their information from being sold on the dark web, and the company was forced to pay a ransom to prevent it.”.
"This is not the teenager, this is the creation of someone else who acts completely differently from him. This person used the vulnerability in TalkTalk days later to demand things and email the CEO of TalkTalk with similar blackmail attempts.".
