News Digest

NZ users’ rush to see leaked nude celeb pics breaks internet

New Zealanders keen to view hacked photos of naked celebrities are being blamed for a nationwide Internet meltdown involving the country’s main provider. It is believed a handful of computer users clicked links on Friday evening believing they would take them to the illicit images, but instead they inadvertently installed malware triggering a crippling Internet attack. It took telecommunications giant Spark, the rebranded Telecom Corp., until Sunday to fully repair what it termed a “dynamic” cyber-attack that overloaded its system covering more than 600,000 customers. The intimate celebrity photos, which included actress Jennifer Lawrence and singers Avril Lavigne and Rihanna, were stolen from a cloud storage system. Spark tweeted it was aware that when people clicked on some links they inadvertently installed malware “generating a high amount of traffic to overseas sites”.

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.

Computer security specialists Trend Micro

Computer security specialists Trend Micro issued an alert shortly before the attack began warning not to open the links related to the nude celebrities. Trend Micro said users who clicked the link offering to show a video of the actress were directed to download a “video converter” that was actually malicious software. New Zealand authorities said they did not know who was behind the attack, which was launched from outside the country, and the malware was generating denial-of-service attacks towards Europe.