OurMine, the hacking group that made a name for itself through its breaches on the social media accounts of big names in the tech industry such as Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg, Google CEO Sundar Pichai and Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey, has now shifted its target to the massively popular augmented reality mobile game Pokémon GO.
The hacking team was said to have launched multiple distributed denial of service, or DDoS, attacks on the servers of Pokémon GO, which are preventing players from logging in to the game and dampening their Pokémon adventure. These DDoS attacks flood servers with traffic, which prevents legitimate users from getting on the servers to use them.
According to the hacking group, it will not be stopping its DDoS attacks on the mobile game's servers until representatives from Nintendo or developer Niantic Labs contact them. In a post on the group's website, OurMine stated that it will prevent users from playing Pokémon GO until its representatives reach out and teach the group how to best protect the servers of the game.
This is similar to OurMine's stated reasons in hacking the social media accounts of Zuckerberg, Pichai and Dorsey, as the group claims that they are testing the security of these platforms and accounts to raise awareness on the need to make further improvements on cybersecurity.
OurMine is not doing these without the goal of financial gains, though, as the group is offering its services to improve cybersecurity for a price of up to $5,000.
However, OurMine is not the only hacking group that is said to be behind the server outages of Pokémon GO, as a team known as PoodleCorp has also claimed responsibility. The group even added that it will be launching a larger-scale attack soon, but it did not reveal the reason behind the DDoS attack and its goal in carrying out such a hack on Pokémon GO servers.
After all, the DDoS attacks of OurMine and PoodleCorp might not even be the chief reason behind the crashing servers of Pokémon GO. While the hacking groups may indeed have launched attacks on the servers, the sheer number of gamers logging in to the mobile app could be crashing the servers on its own.
Niantic is now scrambling to patch up all the issues that gamers are experiencing with Pokémon GO servers as it continues its gradual rollout of the mobile app. Pokémon GO was launched in more than 20 countries, including Canada and mostly nations in Europe, over the weekend, further adding to the load of the game's servers.
