Kim Kardashian at the MET Gala
Kim Kardashian arrives at the Metropolitan Museum of Art Costume Institute Gala Benefit in New York Reuters

The weekend rush of New Zealanders to view hacked photos of naked celebrities led to a nationwide Internet meltdown involving the top Internet provider Spark. The AFP reported that when people clicked on links, hoping to see nude photos of celebrities, they ended up catching malware on their computers. The malware created the distributed denial of service.

Nude Photos of Actresses

It was in the past week that leaked nude photos of celebrities such as Jennifer Lawrence, Ariana Grande and Kim Kardashian were posted online in communities like Reddit and 4chan.These celebrities became the victims of hackers who broke into the iCloud storage systems and took out the private photos and posted them online.

Spark explained that the Internet outage was the result of the web links leading to malware and creating high traffic to overseas sites. It took the ISP, Spark, for almost 48 hours to annul the cyber-attack that overloaded their system that caters to more than half a million customers.

A cyber security alert was in place from security specialists Trend Micro that warned users against opening the links related to nude celebrities or opening email attachments. Doing so, would open the opportunity for malware attacks because cyber criminals are trying to ride on this bandwagon. It also brought to the notice of web users that freshly-concocted schemes are trying to target people who wanted to see the leaked photos.

From Twitter

Trend Micro informed that it identified one of the threats from Twitter, in a tweet that carried hashtags containing the name of Jennifer Lawrence. As soon as users clicked the link hoping to see the video of the actress, they were directed to download a "video converter", which was actually malicious software.

The officials in New Zealand said they were still unaware of the identity of the cyber attacker. It is presumed that the attack might have originated from a foreign country and the malware was generating denial-of-service attacks. Announcing the resumption of the Internet services, Spark spokesman Conor Roberts appealed to the users not to click on dodgy emails and files, if they are unsure about its content and its origin.