Notorious hacker group Poodlecorp has issued a threat that it’ll be taking down the servers of the immensely popular AR mobile game Pokemon Go on August 1. The group intends to achieve this feat by using a series of DDos attacks aimed at the game’s servers.
The group issued a small statement announcing the same thing which didn’t sound too serious, but hey, hackers are not known to be really thoughtful.
We take the servers offline because it is popular right now and nobody can stop us,” @xotehpoodle (a member of the Poodlecorp group) said. “We 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.
Poodlecorp not only intends to take the servers offline, but it intends to keep it that way for more than 20 hours – “basically an entire day.” The attack will be carried out by them using a massive botnet comprising of more than 600,000 devices that includes dedicated servers and proxies.
The same group had claimed to have taken down Pokemon GO‘s servers last Saturday. They have also claimed to have hacked several YouTubers and League of Legends servers recently. The group also managed to hack into the Twitter account of Shuhei Yoshida, President of Sony’s Worldwide Studios for Sony Computer Entertainment Inc.
The hacker group doesn’t hold any grudges against the game and seems to be planning the attack just because the game’s popular and ‘they can,’ which is not a very good reason. Although it’s unclear how serious this threat is, it would be a shame if they manage to accomplish this feat.
We hope Niantic is able to prevent this from happening and would request Poodlecorp to not do this as it would serve no purpose and would harass millions of Pokemon GO players for no reason. What’s the thrill in ruining the fun for others?