Users keen to see naked pictures of celebrities like Jenifer Lawrence, Avril Lavigne and Rihanna, who recently had illicit images hacked from cloud storage, instead download malware that causes havoc in New Zealand's telecommunications network.
A day of infamy, a cowardly attack on our defenseless horny levels by the evil-doers. The innocent desire to see Skater Grrrl's "Charlies" leads to national disaster. Why'd you have to go and make things so complicated?
New Zealanders keen to view hacked photos of naked celebrities are being blamed for a nationwide Internet meltdown involving the country's main provider.
You self-abusing maniacs! You blew it up! Damn you!!!
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.
A handful of something that's for sure, haw haw. While the vast majority of Perth residents were going on line to read FAQs on basement repair or do their report on the Solar System a tiny, wildly unrepresentative minority that wanted to see bare breasts ruined things worse than the Road Map for Peace.
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.
Send in the special "One-handed Typists Wrecked It, Again" squad to clean up the mess. The metaphorical mess, I mean. Not the literal one.
Spark tweeted it was aware that when people clicked on some links they inadvertently installed malware "generating a high amount of traffic to overseas sites."
It's New Zealand. What wouldn't be overseas?
Computer security specialists Trend Micro issued an alert shortly before the attack began warning not to open the links related to the nude celebrities.
"Please rely on the Sears Catalog for your onanism needs until this horrible crisis is over."
"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," it said.
Now that we've been warned, everything should be fine. If you'll excuse me, I just found out I'm a Sudanese Prince and I have to send a $2500 release fee through Western Union so I can get the 93 million I'm entitled to.
"Our scanning brought to our attention some freshly-concocted schemes targeting those looking for the photos borne from the aforementioned leak."
"While doing a routine read-through of all of your e-mails we noticed some schemes."
You clicked on nakedcelebrity.exe. Game Over.
"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."
"Hailing from Twitter...weighing in at 138 characters...The Hobart Voyeur!!!"
Trend Micro said users who clicked the link offering to show a video of the actress were directed to download a "video converter" that was actually malicious software.
Video converter? How can I lose? *clicks link* *computer explodes*
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.
It remains to be seen if we'll finally see New Zealand declare war on all of Europe, but it seems pretty likely.
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