Fatal Exploit Crashes 69% of Dogecoin, but It Could Have Been Worse: The Man Who Saved It Speaks
An exploit first discovered and disclosed by crypto researcher Tobias Ruck crashed over half of the nodes of Dogecoin, a cryptocurrency with a market capitalization of over $58 billion.
This event remarks that cryptocurrency projects are as vulnerable as their codebase.
Dogecoin Attacked Remotely, 69% of Nodes Crashed With Already Disclosed Exploit
Dogecoin, a cryptocurrency project with a market capitalization of over $58 billion, was recently attacked with an exploit that heavily affected its node structure.
The exploit, dubbed “Dogereaper,” allowed Sequentia developer Andreas Kohl to crash 69% of all the Dogecoin nodes using only an old laptop from El Salvador.
The exploit allows any attacker to use the name of any node to remotely crash it.
The “Department Of DOGE Efficiency” account on X likened this behavior to a death note, a fictional notebook that allows the user to write a person’s name to kill it.
While the attack heavily affected dogecoin nodes, it could have been worse: the vulnerability had already been disclosed by Tobias Ruck, an ecash developer, and Roqqit, another developer.
Talking to news.bitcoin.com, Ruck stated that he first discovered this vulnerability while developing doged, an alternative to Dogecoin Core.
Ruck explained that while testing the ported code for their alternative software, he found a segmentation fault that had not been fixed in the original code.
He then confirmed that the vulnerability could target specific nodes and crash them remotely and started planning the disclosure of this failure to fix the issue.
Ruck explained:
We don’t condone crashing nodes, we put a lot of effort into keeping the network secure. The attack could’ve been much more severe.
All the important stakeholders like miners, exchanges etc. have been patched long before the attack, and it shows how important it was that we treaded carefully.
