Looks like what goes around, comes around. Taking down Pokémon GO servers on July 16th, they bragged not long after on Twitter that it was just a taste of what would be happening on August 1st. They promised a complete shutdown of the the Pokémon GO servers for 24 hours. Well, that date came and went without incident for Pokémon trainers, with this trainer wondering what happened to the threat of DDoS attack to the servers.
It turns out that PoodleCorp themselves were given a bit of their own medicine. The groups HamsterOrg and Ghost Squad Hackers are taking the credit for not only stopping the DDoS attack planned by PoodleCorp but are also credited with leaking the names and other personal information of some their members.
There is some speculation online that the members of PoodleCorp are comprised of a group that was banned from Overwatch for cheating, while other online sources mention that some of them are former members of Lizard Squad. Whatever their origins, it seems that getting hacked themselves has not stopped them from attacking other servers. This past week the Battle.net servers that house World of Warcraft and Overwatch (among other Blizard games) were taken offline as well as the Grand Theft Auto, Playstation network servers and a couple porn sites. PoodleCorp has taken the credit for all of these.
Will they eventually make good on their earlier threat to bring the Pokémon Go servers down for 24 hours, or will they fade into obscurity like so many other groups? Personally I prefer the latter. The people and groups who take down game servers are hurting no one but the people that want to play a game to escape the daily grind of life. Did the initial July 16th server outage of Pokémon GO hurt Niantic? Perhaps a little but the majority of those affected were the players themselves.
Only time will tell if this new group will continue to attack.
