Critical Dogecoin Vulnerability Crashes 69% of Network Nodes

A significant security breach recently rocked the Dogecoin network, with a hacker successfully exploiting a vulnerability that led to 69% of its nodes going offline.

On December 12, Andreas Kohl, co-founder of the Bitcoin sidechain Sequentia, revealed that he used an old laptop in El Salvador to trigger the crash, impacting nearly 70% of Dogecoin’s active nodes.

At the time of the attack, Dogecoin had 647 active nodes, but by the time the incident was reported, only 315 were still operational, according to data from Blockchair. Kohl explained that he leveraged a flaw discovered by security researcher Tobias Ruck, which allowed him to disrupt the network.

This vulnerability, called “DogeReaper,” had been previously disclosed on December 4 by an X account named “Department Of DOGE Efficiency,” which described it as a potential network killer. The flaw allows anyone to remotely crash a Dogecoin node by inputting its address.

This is akin to the “Death Note” from the popular manga series, where writing someone’s name leads to their demise. In the case of Dogecoin, the vulnerability triggers a segmentation fault in the node, causing it to crash when it attempts to access unauthorized memory.