Pokemon Go threatened by hackers – SFGate (blog)

Chicago Field Museum’s Terra Cotta warriors hunt game

CHICAGO, IL – JULY 14: People take photo of the Terra Cotta warriors replicas in Chicago, United States on July 14, 016 as Pokemon go game is seen on a screen of a phone. Chicago Field Museum has created its own treasure hunt game while many are obsessed with Pokemon game. 
(Photo by Bilgin S. Sasmaz/Anadolu Agency/Getty Images)

Pokemon Go players may run into issues next month. Hackers have threatened to compromise the service on August 1st with a massive distributed denial of service (DDoS) attack. The attack would prevent Pokemon Go users from playing the game while the service is down.

The group orchestrating the attack calls itself Poodlecorp. It says that it plans to take the service down for 20 or more hours, presumably because it likes “chaos.”

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,” @xotehpoodle, a member of the Poodlecorp group, said in a Twitter DM with Mic. “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 supposedly plans to take the game’s servers down with “a massive botnet consisting of about 600,000 devices ranging from DVRs to routers to cameras to computers to dedicated servers.”

Poodlecorp claims to be responsible for several other attacks, including one against League of Legends earlier this summer.

Pokemon Go on the other hand has been plagued with server issues since its launch. It’s not uncommon for the game to have trouble loading in San Francisco, especially during peak times such as weekends and early evening, when people are heading home from work.

If Poodlecorp is successful with its attack, there’s a good chance that many players might not even realize it’s an attack in the first place.