Pokémon GO is apparently the target of an upcoming attack, as a hacking group called "PoodleCorp" is threatening to take it offline on Aug. 1.
If by any chance you've been living under a rock until now, Pokémon GO is an immensely popular augmented reality (AR) game that has millions of people roaming the streets worldwide in search of virtual Pokémon.
The virtual critters are overlaid on the real world, so when you stumble upon a Pokémon, you can use your phone's camera to see the tiny monster right next to you. To catch it, you simply need to swipe on your phone's screen to throw a Poke Ball and hit the culprit.
The goal is to catch them all, and the Pokémon GO frenzy is in full bloom, expanding to more markets worldwide and getting an increasing number of players hooked. The game's tremendous popularity, however, has also attracted mischievous parties looking to ruin everybody's fun.
Just recently, Pokémon GO players have experienced issues trying to connect to servers, with the game sporadically unavailable for many users across the world. Tech Times reported that not one, but two separate entities took credit for the downtime. One of the groups that assumed responsibility for the Pokémon GO crashes was OurMine, the same group that hacked the social media accounts of various celebrities, while the other group was PoodleCorp.
The latter is now threatening to launch another Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attack to bring Pokémon GO down on Aug. 1. While OurMine repeatedly said its attacks are about pointing out security flaws, PoodleCorp seems to be doing it just for kicks, with no particular reason or goal in mind other than cause disruption.
August 1st #PoodleCorp #PokemonGo
— PoodleCorp (@PoodleCorp) July 18, 2016
"We take the servers offline because it is popular right now and nobody can stop us," says a PoodleCorp member going by the handle @xotehpoodle. "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."
The group plans to knock the Pokémon GO servers offline for more than 20 hours, basically keeping players off the game for nearly an entire day. To do so, PoodleCorp plans to employ a huge botnet made up of 600,000 devices that would flood the servers on Aug. 1.
All user boots hit minimum of 10Gbps and the gold package does 20Gbps Also the botnet packages both hit at least 400Gbps at any time. — XO (@xotehpoodle) July 20, 2016
It seems like a great waste of energy and time to bring down a game that has done nothing more than get people off their couches to walk about their city to catch Pokémon, but hey, each has his own version of fun. "Because we can" seems to be a valid excuse on the internet, at least for idle poodles, so there you have it. If you can't access Pokémon GO on Aug. 1, this may be why. Should this happen, here's what you can do.
