New Zealand's Internet Crashes: Thousands Clicked Fake Celebrity Nudes Link
The primary internet provider Spark (formerly known as Telecorp) in New Zealand crashed due to too many people trying to view what they thought were the celebrity nude photos that leaked late last month. The Daily Mail reports that the links were actually malware inadvertently installed once the user clicked the link.
The malware generated high amounts of traffic to websites that were based overseas which resulted in the overload that caused the crash. According to The Agence France-Presse (AFP) the computer security specialist Trend Micro sent out a report warning to users just before the attack.
"For obvious reasons, clicking on links to 'naked celebrity' photos, or opening email attachments would be a very bad idea right now, expect criminals to ride this bandwagon immediately," it said.
"Our scanning brought to our attention some freshly-concocted schemes targeting those looking for the photos borne from the aforementioned leak. The first threat we found hails from Twitter, in the form of a tweet being posted with hashtags that contain the name of one of the leak's victims -- Jennifer Lawrence."
Trend Micro reported that users were instructed to download a video converter in order to view videos of the actress. The converter was actually the malware.
New Zealand authorities have said that they have not yet found who is behind the attack but that it was generating denial-of-service attacks towards Europe.
The attacks started on Friday and Spark was not able to repair the issues until Sunday according to the Telegraph. The attack overloaded the system which serviced over 600,000 customers.
Ariana Grande, Avril Lavigne and Rihanna were among other celebrities used to bait users into installing the malware due to their connection with the leak.
The leak last month released nude photos of several celebrates onto sites like Reddit and 4chan. It was caused by hackers breaking into several celebrities iCloud accounts.
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