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 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’.