Originally published on: December 12, 2024
A hacker recently took advantage of a critical vulnerability in the Dogecoin network, resulting in a crash of 69% of its nodes.
Andreas Kohl, co-founder of Bitcoin sidechain Sequentia, claimed responsibility for the incident, revealing that he used a simple old laptop in El Salvador to execute the exploit.
Prior to the vulnerability being exploited, Dogecoin had a total of 647 active nodes. However, after the attack, this number dropped significantly to just 315 active nodes, according to data from Blockchair.
Kohl mentioned that he utilized a vulnerability discovered by researcher Tobias Ruck to initiate the node crashes.
A related event saw an account named “Department Of DOGE Efficiency” publicly disclosing a vulnerability in the Dogecoin network on December 4. The account referred to the vulnerability as “DogeReaper” and explained that it had the potential to bring down the entire chain. This vulnerability could remotely crash any Dogecoin node with a simple address input, similar to a “Death Note” from an anime series.
The account highlighted the severity of this vulnerability by stating that with the DogeReaper, anyone could halt the entire Dogecoin network within moments. Despite the potential impact, Coinbase assessed the severity of the issue as low and rewarded Ruck with $200 for the discovery.
The incident underscores the importance of maintaining security measures within cryptocurrency networks to prevent such exploits in the future.
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