Tech Support Lessons From Pokémon Go

July 22nd, 2016 News
Tech Support Lessons From Pokémon Go

Who hasn’t heard of the latest tech craze, Pokémon Go? This popular app has only been released for two weeks – and has already taken the world by storm. Tech lovers in Vancouver are hard at work catching Pokémon – that is, if the Pokémon Go servers weren’t in dire need of support.

That’s right – only two weeks into this international hit and Pokémon Go is having trouble supporting its tech-savvy user base. Whether it’s the massive influx of new, concurrent players or DDOS attacks from hacker groups, the bottom line is that Pokémon Go servers are down.

Pokémon Go has helped Nintendo double its market capitalization, overtaking Sony, since the release of the app on July 6th. The game generates money from micro-transactions, meaning every minute of downtime is costing Nintendo.

Here’s a question for you: how much would an hour of downtime cost your business?

Pokémon Go Could Have Predicted Server Support Issues

Although the popularity of the app certainly took the world by surprise, Niantic (the subsidiary of Nintendo working on Pokémon Go) could have predicted a large influx of users – this is likely why they decided to roll out the game in stages to various countries.

But why is Pokémon Go experiencing server support issues now, several weeks after a successful launch? The answer is simple. Hackers.

As such a popular game, Pokémon Go is a goldmine for hacking opportunities. In this case, two hacker groups – OurMine and PoodleCorp – have claimed responsibility for Distributed Denial Of Service (DDOS) attacks on Pokémon Go. As a result – servers are down, worldwide.

Why Would Hackers Target Pokémon Go?

As with any other scenario, hackers primarily target large organizations for two reasons: notoriety and ransom. This is the same reason why ransomware is so popular.

Notoriety is a particularly relevant issue when it comes to large organizations – but even small to medium-sized businesses aren’t immune from a potential hacking. Hackers love data – and if hackers are able to access your servers, they may be able to steal passwords and email addresses, credentials which can be sold on the black market or used for further hacking.

Needless to say, proper IT security is a must for nearly every online business in this day and age (this is why Quicktech exists!).

What Do You Do To Protect Yourself?

Most business in Vancouver will rarely have the issue of managing tens of millions of people on their network – but the lesson to be learned here is that you would always want to be able to support an influx of new staffing, or scale so that your hardware can support new line of business applications.

When planning your hardware refreshes, you need to have a tech support plan in place – factoring for scale, potential malware and hacker attacks, and more. At Quicktech, our proactive IT support approach is to factor in expected IT issues and stop them from ever occurring.

Allow us to sit down with you and act as your vCIO to plan your hardware refreshes or software implementation projects properly and thoroughly.

Other than drafting a disaster recovery plan, we recommend ongoing IT support that protects your servers, services, and data.

Hackers and malicious programs can strike anytime – so we work through the night to protect you. We take IT personally, constantly monitoring and responding quickly. It’s even in our name – Quicktech.

Contact our tech support team for more information.