Andreas Kohl, co-founder of the Bitcoin sidechain Sequentia, claimed on Thursday on the social media platform X that he exploited a publicly disclosed vulnerability to disable 69% of the Dogecoin network nodes. Kohl stated that he accomplished this using an old laptop in El Salvador.

According to Blockchair's data, before the vulnerability was exploited, there were originally 647 active nodes in the Dogecoin network, but only 315 remained at the time of reporting.

I used a publicly disclosed (by @TobiasRuck) vulnerability to take down 69% of the Dogecoin network from an old thinkpad in rural El Salvador. AMA. https://t.co/BNkGDWkWhu pic.twitter.com/qk16AwMaq5

— Andreas Kohl (@aejkohl) December 12, 2024

Kohl stated that he exploited a vulnerability discovered by researcher Tobias Ruck that caused these nodes to crash, and in response to a question, he mentioned that only nodes that had not been upgraded to the latest version were affected, which covers most nodes in the Dogecoin network, excluding centralized exchanges and most major custodians. 'This is also why most Dogecoin users were barely aware of the issue, as there are not many who understand self-custody.'

On December 4, an X account named 'Department Of DOGE Efficiency' publicly disclosed a vulnerability in the Dogecoin network, claiming that this vulnerability could completely collapse the entire chain. According to the account, this vulnerability named 'DogeReaper' allows anyone to remotely disable any Dogecoin node.

The Department Of DOGE Efficiency claims that since Dogecoin nodes are public, anyone can exploit this vulnerability to instantly crash the entire Dogecoin network. They wrote: 'If a malicious actor had discovered this vulnerability instead of us, it could at least cause the Dogecoin network to be down for several days, unable to process any transactions or generate blocks.'

Although the vulnerability poses potential risks, the account indicates that Coinbase considers its severity to be low and has rewarded $200 to Ruck.

Public Disclosure of "DogeReaper", a critical vulnerability in Dogecoin. DogeReaper is a critical vulnerability on Dogecoin, allowing anyone to crash any Dogecoin node remotely. See the video below for a demonstration. It works similarly to the Japanese manga series "Death… pic.twitter.com/vsBL5kdJFc

— Department Of DOGE Efficiency (@EfficiencyDOGE) December 4, 2024

After Kohl stated that he exploited the vulnerability affecting Dogecoin network nodes, the price of Dogecoin (DOGE) did not see much fluctuation, with the trading price of DOGE at $0.411 before the report, reflecting a 24-hour increase of 1.7%.

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