Hackers who were allegedly responsible for the damage to the popular game over the weekend are threatening an even bigger attack in the coming days.
A hacking group, PoodleCorp, has announced that it will attempt to bring down Pokemon Go on August 1st, through a series of distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks, which will apparently deny access to players.
"It was just a test, we'll do something on a larger scale soon," said Twitter user XO, who claims to be the leader of PoodleCorp.
However, the game's creators, Niantic Labs, claimed that Saturday's outage was "Due to the incredible number of Pokemon Go downloads, some trainers experienced server. Don't worry, our team is working on it." But, PoodleCorp insisted that it was behind the problems.
"We're doing this because it's popular right now and no one can stop us," said Twitter user XO. "We're doing this because we can, no one can stop us and we just want to cause chaos. We chose August 1st so we could have time to relax and not worry about anything."
The PoodleCorp group claims to have taken down Pokemon Go for 20 or more hours, essentially the entire day, using the same method used in other attacks. The hacking group allegedly has access to a botnet consisting of 600,000 devices, which include DVRs and dedicated servers. These types of botnets can easily be purchased or rented on the dark web.
The PoodleCorp Twitter account first posted an updated status on June 23, a day after their first attack against WatchMojo. Other targets include League of Legends, LinusTechTips, StreamMe, IISUPERWOMANII, Battle.net, 21savage, RedMercy , LeafyIsHere, h3h3 and finally, Pokemon Go (July 16).
Poodlecorp, of course, isn't the first group of hackers to make big promises and then fail to deliver on them, but Twitter user XO warns that this time is different.
It seems that the game's great success is causing some people to panic!
