Spark Broadband In New Zealand Back To Normal After IT Meldown Over Celebrity Nude Photos

Customer of Spark, a broadband provider in New Zealand known before as Telecom, said that it had fixed the meltdown on its system that had affected its Internet and mobile platforms on Satuday.

Conor Roberts, communications head of Spark, said the telco's employees fixed the problem through the night, and by Sunday, the network appeared back to normal operations.

The problem was caused by malware attacks made on Spark's systems through attractive click bait on the Internet placed by cyber criminals, triggered by supposed links to the naked photographs of female celebrities such as Hunger Games star Jennifer Lawrence and singers Rihanna and Avril Lavigne.

The images were stolen by a hacker from a cloud storage system. Reports named a Bryan Hamada as the suspect, but he denied the allegation.

When computer users clieck the links of Friday to the alleged sites where the nude photos were posted, initially at 4Chan, they actually installed malware that caused bulk traffice in offshore site. This, in turn, overloaded Spark's network.

Prior to the malware attack, computer security specialists at Trend Micro had actually warned subscribers not to click links that claim to provide images of the female celebrities, according to AFP.

"The first threat we found hails from Twitter, in the form of a tweet being posted with hashtags that contains the name of one of the leak's victims - Jennifer Lawrence," Roberts said.

He explained that when users click the link that is supposed to open a video of Lawrence, they were instead directed to download a video converter which was really malicious software.

Even non-malware Web sites that contain images which goes viral when news goes around social media sites that it contains controversial or graphic images of celebrities have an impact on data demand. A viral image or video can attract millions of hits within hours or days, and such a huge demand for data causes the Web site to crash.

In the past, similar trending topics such as the impeachment decision on then US President Bill Clinton over his sexual liaison with White House OJT Monica Lewinsky caused a crash in the Web site where the impeachment decision was posted.

Online sale by e-commerce Web sites also have a tendency to crash due to huge data demand at the same time since the basement prices are only for a limited period and consumer try to beat the deadline.

Those instances of popular Web sites crashing only points to the need for telcos to constantly upgrade their systems to avoide crashes, whether due to viral videos or malwares.

In the case of Spark, teams put in place ways to manage high volumes of traffic, said Robert, although he also acknowledged that the next point of attack could change in the future and the firm would need to cut that when such an event takes place. The ways including remmoving affected computers from Spark's network.

For their part, consumers must ensure they have sufficient virus protection and their spyware are up to date, plus they must no click suspicious links, Roberts added.