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A TELECOMS COMPANY in New Zealand is continuing to investigate the cause of a massive internet outage over the weekend, originally thought to be linked to users attempting to access nude celebrity photos.
More than 600,000 customers with internet provider Spark were left without access for as long as 36 hours after the system became overloaded.
A number of Spark customers’ modems are thought to have been hijacked for use in a distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attack on computers in Eastern Europe.
This is where a website is bombarded with fake requests, sometimes as many as thousands per second, overloading it servers and causing it to become inaccessible.
It was initially thought that hackers had tricked users who were looking to download recently leaked nude photos of celebrities. Instead, malware was installed on their computers.
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Likely cause is a handful of customers’ computers being affected by malware, generating a high amount of traffic to overseas sites. 2/5 #RPT
However, a statement from the company this morning revealed that they were following a new line of inquiry – a cyber attack ‘from overseas, to overseas’.
According to The Age, a vulnerability in 138 old, incorrectly configured, modems allowed hackers to route this cyber attack through user’s computers, to attack websites in Eastern Europe.
“While we’re not ruling out malware as a factor, we have also identified that cyber criminals have been accessing vulnerable customer modems on our network,” a statement on the company’s Facebook page read.
These modems have been identified as having “open DNS resolver” functionality, which means they can be used to carry out internet requests for anyone on the internet. This makes it easier for cyber criminals to ‘bounce’ an internet request off them
“Most of these modems were not supplied by Spark and tend to be older or lower-end modems… We have now disconnected those modems from our network and are contacting all the affected customers.”
Computer security specialists Trend Micro issued an alert shortly before the attack began warning not to open links related to the nude celebrities.
“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.
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.
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The poor girl,how could she ever rest in peace,no family as yet,buried in a place she probably never knew,from her shoulders down in a coffin and her skull probably in a box in a basement somewhere..such a sad story..your right Jane how do you lose a skull..
My parents were involved in the recovery of the body of a man in the early 2000′s (?) in the Shannon Estuary. That man has never been identified. He was given a state burial in Ennis. Another member of the rescue crew entered a competition on Clare FM a short time after to win a headstone. The competition called for people to write their own epitaph. He wrote one for the unidentified man and won. “All you people of Co. Clare, kneel down here and say a prayer, for the man from God knows where”. Very sad to think that there is no name on that headstone.
That made me go cold. What a lovely thing to do for someone and a lovely epitaph.Unclaimed bodies always make me feel so terribly sad, lost souls,some never missed and others never found.
Thats the sad thing about stories like this, maybe no family to miss her! Like the lady who’s body was found in the sea in clontarff I dont think she was even identified never mind been missed! We all take it so much for granted that everyone has family! Cherish yours everyday♡♡
A pretty epic fail really by forensic standards. No dental xrays,no chance of facial reconstrustion. Plus its just bad form to loose a part of someone,how’d you even do that its not exactly a set if keys!
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