Andreas Kohl, co-founder of the Bitcoin sidechain Sequentia, claimed responsibility for crashing 69% of the Dogecoin network by exploiting a critical vulnerability dubbed “DogeReaper.”
On Dec. 12 the Department of DOGE Efficiency, the @EfficiencyDOGE X account that monitors activity on the Dogecoin (DOGE) network, reported that a hacker took down nearly 69% of the meme coin network’s nodes.
Data from the private blockchain search engine Blockchair revealed that Dogecoin had 647 active nodes before the hack. By the time the vulnerability was discovered and reported by @EfficiencyDOGE, only 205 nodes remained active. At the time of writing, the network had recovered slightly to 373 active nodes.
Co-founder of the Bitcoin sidechain Sequentia, Andreas Kohl, claimed he was responsible for the hack on Dogecoin. He said he took down the network using a computer located in El Salvador.
“Let the records show that on this day 69% of the Dogecoin network was taken down by a single ThinkPad in rural El Salvador,” wrote Kohl as he quoted the @EffeciencyDOGE post showcasing the crash.
In a separate post, Kohl gave credit to Tobias Ruck, the researcher who discovered the vulnerability on the Dogecoin network which caused the nodes to crash. The vulnerability is called the “DogeReaper” which has the power to take down the entire network if given the chance. The account @EfficiencyDOGE shared a public discclosure post containing a video and detailed instructions on how the critical vulnerability could be exploited.
“DogeReaper is a critical vulnerability on Dogecoin, allowing anyone to crash any Dogecoin node remotely,” wrote @EfficiencyDOGE.
The account explained that the vulnerability works like the “Death Note” in the popular Japanese manga of the same name. The plot is centered around a cursed notebook where the main character writes down the name of a person and that person immediately dies.
With “DogeReaper” the concept is very similar, all the hacker has to do is type out the address of the Dogecoin node the hacker wants to crash, and that node will instantly die of a Segmentation Fault.
Because the addresses of Dogecoin nodes are public knowledge, the account stated that “anyone could crash the entire Dogecoin network in an instant.”
“If a malicious actor would’ve found this bug instead of us, he could have stopped the Dogecoin network for at least a few days, with no transactions or blocks,” said the account.
Kohl’s hack apparently had little to no affect on the Dogecoin price. According to data on crypto.news, DOGE has gone up by 3.1% in the past 24 hours of trading with a 24 hour trading volume of $7.3 billion.
Moreover, the account claimed that Tobias Ruck and RoqqitDev had sent multiple disclosures to the network as well as major exchanges to prevent people from exploiting the vulnerability.
Upon receiving the information, Binance vowed to fix the vulnerability sometime “this week.” While Coinbase reviewed the report and graded the severity of DogeReaper as “low” before marking the ticket with the status “informative” and granting Ruck $200.
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