It’s A Pokémon GO Hackathon- Or Is It? | TechTree.com

It’s A Pokémon GO Hackathon- Or Is It?

Two hacker groups claimed to have hacked Pokémon GO over two consecutive days.

 
It’s A Pokémon GO Hackathon- Or Is It?

It’s no secret that Pokémon GO servers are bound to crash anytime, anywhere. It’s a worldwide complaint. So when servers went down again on Saturday, no one thought much of it.

At least until this popped up:

Image via Twitter

A hacking outfit called PoodleCorp announced on Twitter that it was behind the action, but this claim is yet to be verified. They claimed that they took down the Pokémon GO servers using a DDOS (Distributed Denial Of Service) attack. The servers were flooded with so many requests every second that they couldn’t cope, and thus crashed.

Understandably, players were outraged at this.

Image via Twitter

Image via Twitter

The very next day, another hacking outfit, OurMine, claimed responsibility for a second hack that kept servers down on Sunday too.  In a post on the OurMine website, they wrote: “No one will be able to play this game till Pokemon Go contact us on our website to teach them how to protect it!”

OurMine’s alleged attack was also a DDoS attack. A member of the group told TechCrunch that they are a three-member teenage group trying to raise awareness about cybersecurity. The group has made a name for itself of late in cyber circles through a series of high-profile social media hacks.

What’s more, there’s a ‘hacking event’ of sorts in the near future: PoodleCorp has threatened to take down the Pokémon GO servers once again on August 1.

Image via Twitter

“We take the servers offline because it is popular right now and nobody can stop us,” said @xotehpoodle, a member of the Poodlecorp group. “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.”

That sounds vaguely sociopathic, but okay.

Pokémon Go players, beware. It looks like there’s a running game of ‘who can mess with the servers best’, and it won’t be much fun for you.

But nothing has been proved as yet- it could well be that these two noted hacking outfits are simply taking advantage of Pokémon GO’s notorious server crashes. Because to be honest, the game doesn’t need a DDoS attack to collapse the servers; they do that well enough themselves.


Tags : Pokemon GO, Pokemon GO Hack