New Zealanders Click on Celeb Nude Photos Link, Get Malware Instead

By Madeleine Davies  |  September 8, 2014 | 6:20pm

Curious pervs in New Zealand have triggered a nationwide internet attack after too many users of the country’s largest internet provider clicked on malware-infested links that promised nude photos of Jennifer Lawrence. Couldn’t have happened to nicer people.

Popular telecommunications company Spark reports that a small number of customers clicked links offering the private photos of several of female celebrities (the ones targeted in last week’s hack) and generated “a high amount of traffic to overseas sites.” The overseas sites caused users to unwittingly download malware that overloaded Spark’s system.

Soon after the attack began, computer security specialists Trend Micro sent users an alert, warning:

“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…
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.”

(Left out of Trend Micro’s warning: Don’t click links promising naked celebrity photos because they were posted without permission and these people’s bodies are none of your damn bees’ wax.)

According to the Telegraph:

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.

How cool would it be if the person responsible was Jennifer Lawrence?

Image via Getty.

 
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