New Zealand's internet crashed after users clicked fake links to nude celebrities

New Zealand faced a nationwide internet meltdown after people tried to view what they thought were new celebrity nude photos that had been leaked. The country's main internet provider Spark New Zealand, formerly Telecom crashed causing an uproar with their customers.

On August 31st, a massive hack led to a leak of tons of nude photos of major celebrities. Ariana Grande, Aubrey Plaza, Bar Rafaeli and Jennifer Lawrence were all victims of the breach after their private images were taken out of their iCloud storage systems and posted to online communities within Reddit and 4chan.

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.

Computer security specialists Trend Micro issued an alert shortly before the attack began warning not to open the links related to the nude celebrities.

"For obvious reasons, clicking on links to 'naked celebrity' photos, or opening e-mail attachments would be a very bad idea right now, expect criminals to ride this bandwagon immediately," it said.

"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."

Trend Micro reported that users were instructed to download a video converter in order to view videos of the actress. The converter was actually the malware.

New Zealand authorities have said that they have not yet found who is behind the attack but that it was generating denial-of-service attacks towards Europe.