A hacker exploited a critical vulnerability in the Dogecoin network, crippling 69% of the network.
Andreas Kohl, co-founder of Bitcoin sidechain Sequentia, announced on December 12 that he was able to take down a large portion of the Dogecoin network using an old El Salvador laptop.
According to Blockchair data, there were 647 active nodes on the Dogecoin network before the attack, but after the attack, this number dropped to 315.
Kohl said that the attack used a vulnerability discovered by researcher Tobias Ruck.
DogeReaper Vulnerability and "Death Note" Analogy
On December 4th, an X (former Twitter) account called “Department Of DOGE Efficiency” announced a vulnerability in the Dogecoin network that had the potential to completely crash the chain. The vulnerability was called “DogeReaper.” The account stated that the vulnerability had a similar mechanism to the famous Japanese manga and anime series “Death Note.” In the story, writing someone’s name in a notebook causes the person to die of a heart attack.
DogeReaper similarly targets a node's address, creating a segmentation fault, which causes the node to crash. A segmentation fault occurs when a program attempts to access areas of memory that are not allowed, causing the system to halt the program for security reasons.
According to the account, since Dogecoin nodes are generally known to everyone, this exploit has the potential to "completely crash the Dogecoin network at once." If a malicious individual discovered this vulnerability, the Dogecoin network could stall for several days, with no transactions or blocks occurring.
Tobias Ruck, who discovered the vulnerability, shared his findings with Coinbase, but Coinbase rated the vulnerability as low severity and only gave Ruck a $200 bounty.
