Posted while maintaining what I think is an appropriate level of skepticism…
Ben Ellery and Jaber Mohamed, who continue to report as if the dark web is something new, report that they are in contact with someone who uses the handle “The Martian” who claims to have 1 million TalkTalk users’ information – email addresses, bank account numbers and sort codes – available for bulk purchase. Obviously any such claim conflicts significantly with TalkTalk’s assessment of how many customers had their data stolen, as just yesterday, they announced that the total number of customers whose personal details were accessed is 156,959 and of these customers, 15,656 bank account numbers and sort codes were accessed.
So…. less than 16 thousand or 1 million? Do you believe the individual The Mail communicated with or TalkTalk (or neither)? According to the reporters, “The Martian”
claims to have intimate knowledge of last month’s cyber-attack which has left huge numbers of TalkTalk customers exposed to fraud, and wiped millions off the company’s share price.
He said he was directly communicating with those responsible on the day of the hack, which he claimed occurred three days before TalkTalk reported it to the police. The criminals later passed him a database of customers’ details
The reporters claim that they verified the authenticity of a sample of data they received – at least to the extent that those named in the sample are TalkTalk customers. It’s not clear to me whether those customers’ data had been caught up in any prior TalkTalk data breach.
Read more on The Daily Mail, and don’t be confused by their coverage of the fourth arrest in the case (the 16-year-old from Norwich). I don’t think they mean to suggest that that youth is “The Martian.”