New hacking crew makes its presence felt

Jul 17, 2016 21:20 GMT  ·  By

On Saturday, at around 2 PM, Pokemon GO servers experienced a prolonged downtime that affected all game infrastructure, all due to a DDoS attack carried out by the relatively new PoodleCorp hacking crew.

As most DDoS attacks against gaming targets, the hackers weren't really focused on crashing the servers or extorting the company but were rather interested in getting a reaction from the annoyed gamers, which didn't fail to arrive, on both Reddit and Twitter, and with a lot of vitriol.

PoodleCorp playing spoilsport with Pokemon GO players

Just like Lizard Squad and Phantom Squad's Christmas attacks on the Xbox and PSN networks these past years, the hackers were actually focused on ruining everyone else's fun.

And we all know how much people like Pokemon GO these days. For example, take this video of hundreds of players flocking to a park in New York, just because a rare Pokemon appeared nearby.

The servers came back to normal a few hours later. The legitimacy of the attack was called into question a few hours later, when Nintendo announced they launched the game to 26 more countries.

Pokemon GO expands to other countries

The new countries soon to be engulfed by Pokemon GO-mania are Austria, Belgium, Bulgaria, Croatia, Cyprus, Czech Republic, Denmark, Estonia, Finland, Greece, Greenland, Hungary, Iceland, Ireland, Latvia, Lithuania, Luxembourg, Malta, Netherlands, Norway, Poland, Romania, Slovakia, Slovenia, Sweden, and Switzerland.

It may be that PoodleCorp just capitalized on a planned server downtime to extend the game's infrastructure to get a boost for their name.

Previously, this newly formed six-member group had defaced a few YouTube channels and launched DDoS attacks on StreamMe, Battle.NET, and League of Legends servers. The group isn't even a month old, being active since June 22, according to their website.

UPDATE [July 18, 2016]: Pokemon servers are once again under a DDoS attack, but this time from the OurMine hacking crew.

UPDATE [July 20, 2016]: PoodleCorp has announced an upcoming DDoS attack on Pokemon GO servers for August 1. See tweet below.