Two males who carried out a cyber-attack which crippled Transport For London (TfL) after they had been youngsters have each been sentenced to 5 years and 6 months in jail.
Owen Flowers, 18, from Walsall, and Thalha Jubair, 20, from east London, pleaded guilty in June to finishing up the hack in 2024.
They had been described as computer-obsessed loners who carried out the hack as a part of the cyber crime collective referred to as Scattered Spider.
The cyber-attack disrupted TfL’s on-line companies for months, stole the personal data of millions of people and left all 27,000 TfL workers needing to reset their passwords in particular person.
Woolwich Crown Court docket heard the criminals streamed their 16 hour lengthy cyber-attack on-line.
The Nationwide Crime Company (NCA) mentioned the rise of younger hackers within the UK as one of many largest threats to the nation’s cyber safety.
Flowers was 17 and Jubair was 18 after they hacked into the capital’s transport authority at 1700 on 31 August.
Telegram messages despatched between the pair confirmed them boasting about having access to TfL’s database of individuals with Oyster playing cards.
The teenagers then searched the checklist for the non-public particulars of London celebrities, earlier than trying to entry banking particulars.
“Scattered Spider is creating webs on the London Underground,” Flowers would later joke – referring to the loosely coordinated group of younger English-speaking hackers.
The group has been linked to dozens of different cyber-attacks together with on retailers Marks and Spencer and the Co-op.
Within the final two years younger males and boys have been arrested for Scattered Spider hacks within the UK, US and Finland.
