Seventeen-year-old British boy confesses to being involved in TalkTalk hack

A 17-year-old British boy has confessed that he hacked into the provider TalkTalk in October 2015. During the hearing, he said his motivation for the action was that he wanted to ‘impress his friends’.

The teenager confessed to committing a total of seven crimes, writes The Guardian. The boy is one of seven people arrested in connection with the hack, the BBC reports. His lawyer states that the boy’s role has remained limited. According to the newspaper, the judges want to spare the teenager a prison sentence, but first want to gather more information. The sentence will be determined on December 13.

The boy said he didn’t think about the consequences of his actions and just wanted to impress. On the day of the hack, the boy is said to have contacted one of his friends via Skype and said that ‘he had done enough to get a prison sentence’. According to the Public Prosecutor, the boy was not the one who discovered the leak at TalkTalk and that it was already discussed by other people before the hack.

The teenager was arrested on November 3 last year. A house search revealed that he had broken into other websites in addition to TalkTalk, including those of British universities. Earlier it had become known that the hack, in which the data of 150,000 customers was stolen, was carried out by means of SQL injection. The British provider was fined approximately 450,000 euros by the ICO regulator for improperly securing customer data. The hack would also have cost TalkTalk about 95,000 customers.

The Guardian writes that a second teenager is also on trial for the hack. He is said to have asked TalkTalk for an amount of 250,000 euros in a cryptocurrency in exchange for the data.