Pokemon Go: Hacker Group Threatens To Take The Popular Game Offline On August 1
Hackers who were allegedly responsible for the popular augmented reality game, Pokemon Go to go offline over the weekend have threatened of an even bigger attack in the coming days.
A hacking group, PoodleCorp, has announced that it will attempt to take Pokemon Go offline on August 1 through a series of distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks, which will apparently deny access to the players.
“Just was a lil [sic] test, we will do something on a larger scale soon,” said Twitter user XO, who claims to be the leader of PoodleCorp.
However, the gameโs creators Google startup, Niantic Labs claimed Saturdayโs outage was “Due to the incredible number of Pokemon Go downloads, some Trainers are experiencing server connectivity issues. Don’t worry, our team is on it.” But, PoodleCorp insisted that it was behind the problems.
โWe take the servers offline because it is popular right now and nobody can stop us,โ Twitter user XO said. โWe do it because we can, nobody can stop us and we just like to cause chaos. We chose August 1 so we have time to relax and not care about doing anything.โ
The PoodleCorp group claims it will take Pokemon Go offline for about 20 or so hours, essentially the whole day, using the same method they have used on other attacks. The hacking group allegedly has access to a botnet that consists of 600,000 devices, which include DVRs and dedicated servers. These types of botnets can easily be bought or rented on the dark web so there’s no real hacking going on.
PoodleCorp’s Twitter account first posted a status update on June 23, a day after their first attack against WatchMojo. Their other targets include League of Legends, LinusTechTips, StreamMe, iiSuperWomanii (Youtube channel), Battle.net, 21savage, RedMercy (Youtube channel), LeafyIsHere (Youtube channel), h3h3 (Youtube channel), and finally Pokemon Go (July 16).
https://twitter.com/PoodleCorp/status/754845127114387456
Poodlecorp, of course, isnโt the first group of hackers that have made big claims and then failed to follow through. However, Twitter user XO warns that this time itโs different, โbecause we made a promise.โ It has also warned Pokemon addicts: โFind something else to do because if thatโs all you have to do you need a life.โ
Pokemon Go, which was officially launched on July 6, has taken the world by storm and its rage has been continuing ever since. The augmented reality game swiftly outdid the number of users on the dating app Tinder, and soon had greater user engagement than Twitter and Facebook.