Two 'extraordinarily talented' hackers have been jailed for their roles in a £77million TalkTalk cyber attack which hit 1.6million accounts and led to firm's chief executive getting blackmail demands

Axar.az reports citing Daily Mail.

Matthew Hanley, 23, broke into the site in 2015 and passed on stolen customer details to his 21-year-old friend Connor Allsopp, who then handed this on to another online user for fraud.

Judge Anuja Dhir QC, sitting at the Old Bailey, jailed Hanley for 12 months and Allsopp for eight months.

TalkTalk was fined a record £400,000 for security failings which allowed the data to be accessed 'with ease' in one of the biggest data breaches in history.

Judge Dhir said it was a tragedy to find 'two individuals of such extraordinary talent' in the dock.

She told the pair, both from Tamworth in Staffordshire: 'You were both involved in a significant, sophisticated systematic hack attack in a computer system used by TalkTalk.

Allsopp admitted supplying a file of TalkTalk customers' details to an online user for fraud, as well as files for hacking.

The laptop which Allsopp was using at the time of the offences has never been recovered. He claims it was destroyed in a house fire.

In one of his Hanley's online conversations with a user called 'Simplyediting', he boasted: 'I'm dumping the TalkTalk ISP database haha'.

'Dumping' means exporting hacked information to a file on the hacker's device.

When officers came to Hanley's house to arrest him he was in bed, and told them: 'I know who did it. It wasn't the 15-year-old kid. They used his servers but it wasn't him'.