Over the last eight months, the telecom company TalkTalk have been hacked not once, not twice, but three times. This has potentially exposed the personal information of their 4 million customers to cyber criminals and caused one hell of a headache for their IT department. However, they have now received what is effectively a ransom note that reads as follows:

We Have adapted To The Security measures Of The Web…We Cannot Be Stopped. We have made our tracks untraceable through onion routing, encrypted chat messages, private key emails, hacked servers. We will teach our children to use the web for Allah.. Your hands will be covered in blood.. judgement day is soon… one childrens name is Mohammed. Your women are being taken over by us. Your children are being killed by us for being shit on earth.

Aside from being quite poorly written, this makes it quite clear who is responsible for the attacks. This is not the first time that Jihadist muslims have used the internet as a means to attack the west, however it is potentially the most severe. As to whether or not this hacker works directly for ISIS is yet to be ascertained, but one thing’s for sure, ‘onion routing’ is serious business. Perhaps this is a response to being trolled by us a while back.

I’m not sure what it is they actually plan to do with the data they have other than sell it on to the highest bidder. That’s still bad as it means that they will have more money to spend on terrorism, but it doesn’t actually pose that much of a direct threat to national security. Either that or a lot of people are going to start getting some very strange prank calls.

Dido Harding, head of TalkTalk said this about the level of risk posed to their customers:

I am, in a sense, saying that there is a risk that all of our customers’ personal data has been accessed and therefore we are taking that very seriously and looking to make sure that we can help our customers protect themselves if that data has been stolen.

So if you’re a TalkTalk customer, you can officially start freaking out in the knowledge that potentially several thousand angry jihadists have your number. Literally.