Dogecoin flaw exploited by hacker, crashes 69% of nodes

A hacker exploited a critical vulnerability in the Dogecoin network, causing 69% of its nodes to crash.

On Dec. 12, Andreas Kohl, co-founder of Bitcoin sidechain Sequentia, claimed that he had crashed 69% of the Dogecoin network. Kohl said he used an old laptop in El Salvador to execute it. 

Data from Blockchair indicated that Dogecoin had 647 active nodes before the vulnerability was exploited. At the time of writing, Dogecoin had 315 active nodes. 

Source: Andreas Kohl

Kohl said he used a vulnerability discovered by researcher Tobias Ruck to cause the nodes to crash. 

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DogeReaper vulnerability similar to a “Death Note”

On Dec. 4, an X account called “Department Of DOGE Efficiency” publicly disclosed a vulnerability on the Dogecoin network that they said could have crashed the chain entirely. According to the account, the “DogeReaper” vulnerability allows anyone to crash any Dogecoin node remotely. 

The account said that the vulnerability functions like a “Death Note” from the Japanese manga and anime of that name. In that fictional world, writing someone’s name in a notebook will cause them to die of a heart attack.

The account said that the vulnerability does something similar to Dogecoin nodes. With the DogeReaper, the social media account said, anyone could write a node’s address and cause the node to die of a segmentation fault. 

In computing, a segmentation fault happens when a program tries to access a part of a memory that it’s not allowed to use. When this happens, the operating system stops the program for safety reasons, resulting in a crash.

The account claimed that since Dogecoin nodes are publicly known, “anyone could crash the entire Dogecoin network in an instant” using the vulnerability. “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,” they wrote.

While the vulnerability had potential, the account said Coinbase deemed the severity low and had rewarded Ruck with $200. 

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