Search icon

Entertainment

02nd Aug 2016

Hackers have taken down the hackers trying to take down Pokemon Go

The heroes we need right now.

Kevin Beirne

Not all heroes wear capes. Sometimes they don’t wear anything at all.

Maybe we’re projecting a little based on our experience of working late nights on a computer by ourselves (enjoy that image, readers) but the point remains, sometimes we find saviours in the unlikeliest of places.

When the Pokemon Go servers went down on July 16, hacker group PoodleCorp took responsibility for the outage and then threatened something on a larger scale to take place on August 1.

https://twitter.com/PoodleCorp/status/754845127114387456

But if you played Pokemon Go yesterday you might have realised that (besides the updates to the app causing some pretty big issues) the game was working pretty much as usual.

That’s because something wonderful happened to ensure that we all got our fill of fictional personal monsters.

In a move so meta it would make Dan Harmon’s head spin, the hackers were hacked themselves by another group of hackers, who appear to view the first set of hackers as the hacks of the hacking world.

meta gif

Still with us? Good, because it gets a little bit more confusing when we try to figure out exactly who is responsible.

A group calling themselves Team Toxic announced on July 31 that they would be attempting to thwart PoodleCorp’s mission to take down the Pokemon Go servers (presumably under the instructions of their leader, Koga).

But another group, HamsterOrg, claimed it was they who removed PoodleCorps tools.

https://twitter.com/HamsterOrg/status/760142925506482176

But then they were accused of stealing credit from yet another hacking group by someone with the rather ironic Twitter username of ‘does it matter’.

https://twitter.com/a_mw2/status/760285136294387713

We’re not hacking experts here at JOE. In fact, we’ve had to abandon plenty of old email accounts after forgetting our passwords.

So we’re not going to pretend to know who saved the day. So thanks to whoever it was, we are more grateful than you can ever know.

Want to win a free TV or iPad? Enter the draw to win one by taking part in our #MenUnmasked survey.

Topics:

Pokemon Go