Regardless of the form your money might take, everyone knows that where there is money, there are also going to be thieves. No one knows that better than Dogecoin enthusiasts, who just got hit by yet another one of those pesky hackers looking to get rich quick off of messing with cryptocurrencies.
If you don’t remember Dogecoin (because the Internet has a collective attention span of about three hours, let us fill you in). The cryptocoin was first created in December last year by a bunch of doge meme fans, and promptly took off from there. It is unique in that it doesn’t have a hard cap for mining; at the time of inception it was intended to cap at 100 billion, but that has since been overturned and replaced with a “limitless” stream of Dogecoins.
Today the Doge Vault, one of the leading online wallets for Dogecoin, announced that their service “was compromised by attackers” on May 11th, “resulting in a service disruption and tampering with wallet funds.” The official statement on their website continues:
As soon as the administrator of Doge Vault was alerted, the service was halted. The attackers had already accessed and destroyed all data on the hosted virtual machines.
We are currently in the process of identifying the extent of the attack and potential impact on user’s funds. This involves salvaging existing wallet data from an off-site backup. We will also closely be investigating potential attack vectors, and determining the security breach which enabled the attacker’s to compromise the service.
The Doge Vault has not yet publicly disclosed how much money they lost, but As Ars Technica points out, a new Dogecoin wallet has had 121,550,030 transferred into it over the past 24 hours. That’s about $56,000 at current exchange rates. Yikes. That’s also a lot more than the last time a hacker made off with 21 million Dogecoins not long after it launched, which only amounted to $11,500 back then.
The response within the Dogecoin mining community is appropriately grim, especially because they pride themselves on being such a positive place. Said one Redditor to the thief:
SHAME ON YOU. This community is so amazing, altruistic and giving, it has helped a lot of people and is simple joy for everyone who is part of it. Stealing from this community just makes you the worst type of person out there. Those Dogecoin could have gone to good use and now they’re in your selfish hands. Stealing all those Dogecoin from these shibes is like stealing a lollipop from a little boy. We’re just enjoying having fun with this cryptocurrency and you come along and just hurt our community like this. I hope you at least find something good to do with what you have stolen from us.
Alas, that’s not actually how the world works. But bless these doges hearts for wanting to do something nice with their money.
(via Ars Technica, image via Jhyrachy on Reddit)
- Remember that time they donated $30,000 in Dogecoin to the Jamaican bobsled team?
- The first time Dogecoin got hacked was pretty awful
- We still can’t even believe that this is a thing
