Hackers vow to take down Pokémon Go on August 1st

If you’re a fan of popular app sensation Pokémon Go, you may want to make some non-Pokemon related plans on August 1st. At least that is according to popular hacking “collective” PoodleCorp.

The Pokémon Go app has not been without its troubles. During the first few weeks following its launch, many players were getting error messages about server issues.

These were reportedly – but not confirmed – to have been caused by malicious hackers determined on taking down the game.

And now a hacking collective known as PoodleCorp have vowed via their Twitter feed to take down the game on a much larger scale, most likely through what is known as a DDoS attack.

A DDoS attack stands for Distributed Denial of Service. This is where the hackers will send large volumes of completely useless data to the servers hosting the Pokemon Go app with the intention of flooding them so real players cannot access those server resources, thus crashing the game.


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A popular real-world analogy would be like sending thousands of non-paying people to a small café – people who would use the café’s resources – like tables, chairs, toilets. The idea being that the café would be so consumed with non-paying people that actual paying customers could not get in and, well, pay for stuff!

It’s a popular tactic hackers use to bring down online services. Such attacks have previously crippled Twitter and the Sony PlayStation network.

So will the attack actually happen? It’s hard to know for certain. Sometimes these attacks fail to materialize into anything, sometimes they do. We’ll have to wait and see.

This is not the only problem that Nintendo and Pokémon Go developers Niantic are facing. Multiple fake versions of the Pokémon Go app have been found in the Google Play store that can either serve up spammy pop-up ads or attempt to scare phone users by claiming their phone has been locked and the user needs to pay a ransom in order to regain access. We discuss this issue here.

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