Disabling Dogecoin

Co-founder of the Bitcoin sidechain Sequentia, Andreas Kohl, was able to stop 69% of the Dogecoin network nodes by exploiting a previously discovered vulnerability.

He stated that he used a flaw in the system previously discovered by researcher Tobias Ruk. The vulnerability was named DogeReaper. It allows for the remote disabling of any node if its ID is known in the network.

As a result, Kohl crashed about 69% of Dogecoin validators. After his intervention, the number of active nodes dropped from 647 to 258. Subsequently, the blockchain's operation was fully restored.

This bug posed a huge danger, threatening the stability of the entire network. Therefore, researchers provided detailed information about the exploit to miners and exchanges, and patches were released for most systems.