Bitcoiner claims he crashed 70% of Dogecoin network with an old laptop

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—by Protos Staff

An El Salvador-based Bitcoin maxi says he took down 70% of the Dogecoin ($DOGE) network on Wednesday, using an old laptop and a publicly available exploit.

Bitcoin sidechain developer Andreas Kohl shared screenshots on X that suggest he crashed 442 of Dogecoin’s nodes, almost 69% of the entire network, using an old Thinkpad laptop and the ‘DogeReaper’ vulnerability.

‘DogeReaper’ allows an individual to crash any Dogecoin node remotely. The exploit was revealed publicly on December 4 by the Department Of DOGE Efficiency (not to be confused with Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency).

Kohl claimed he was able to crash the majority of the Dogecoin network yesterday.

Read more: Bitcoin Lightning bug could jam and steal millions of dollars

“Bitcoin Monk” Tobias Ruck and software developer Roqqit both discovered the vulnerability, which was then disclosed in secret to miners and crypto exchanges. A patch for the node was created but most of the nodes in the network failed to update to the new patch, resulting in the network ultimately being exploited. 

According to the Doge Efficiency account, a malicious actor could’ve “stopped the Dogecoin network for at least a few days, with no transactions or blocks,” rendering the price of DOGE “closer to $0 than to $1.”

The account also noted that Coinbase considered the severity of the Dogecoin node exploit as “low” and “informative.” According to Roqqit, “We never received confirmation that Coinbase updated to a non-vulnerable version of Dogecoin.”

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