Lessons From TalkTalk Data Loss Should Prevent Recurrence Says Police & Crime Commissioner

Cambridgeshire’s Police and Crime Commissioner Graham Bright presented a report on Cybercrime to Cambridgeshire’s Police and Crime Panel on the 4th of November 2015.

Graham Bright spoke about the personal data loss from TalkTalk and told the panel :

we shouldn’t have any other big telecom people go down in the same way because they’re all aware of what happened and know how to stop it.

I reported what the Police and Crime Commissioner had said live from the meeting and a number of people commented on the ridiculous nature of the Police and Crime Commissioner’s statement.

If a previously unknown vulnerability in a common system was exploited then perhaps the investigation of this occurrence will result in it being fixed; this would prevent identical attacks being successful again in the future against those who have applied the fix.

For the Police and Crime Commissioner to suggest that learning what went wrong in this instance will prevent all similar events occurring in the future is silly.

Transcript

With TalkTalk everyone now sort of realises that there is something out there which will affect you.
…
It all comes back to a young boy of fifteen and if I understand it right a couple of more teenagers have gone with them. Made it sound like a marvellous sort of getting in and hacking.

They just spotted a weak link. I know that for a fact. It was a weak link which has sent a lot of people scurrying to plug that gap. If that hadn’t come out as quickly as it did. It’s great they actually caught this person because now they can find out how they did it.

There’s a weak link which will be plugged. Because otherwise a huge number of businesses and individuals could have been picked up on that so that’s been something else interesting from TalkTalk’s point of view and we shouldn’t have any other big telecom people go down in the same way because they’re all aware of what happened and know how to stop it.

The audio quality is poor, but that reflects the difficulty in hearing speakers from the public seating.