British judge orders 17-year-old TalkTalk hacker measure

A British judge has imposed a measure in the form of a twelve-month ‘rehabilitation order’ on a 17-year-old boy who was involved in the hack on provider TalkTalk. As a result, the boy will not be jailed.

The boy confessed to his involvement in November and said at the hearing that he wanted to impress his friends by hacking into the provider. The BBC writes that when announcing the sentence against the 17-year-old, the British judge said that ‘his IT skills will always be there, but that he can better use them for legal purposes in the future’. A ‘rehabilitation order’ can take various forms, for example regular contact with a civil servant or participation in activities.

The boy was arrested on November 3 last year and is not the only one on trial for the hack on the provider. According to the prosecutor, he was not the one who discovered the sql leak at TalkTalk. As a result of the data breach, the provider was fined 455,000 euros by the British privacy regulator. The cost of the hack is estimated at millions of euros and TalkTalk lost about 95,000 customers as a result of the incident.