Popular Dogecoin wallet Doge Vault confirmed its announcement earlier this week that it had been hacked, posting a statement on its website late Thursday that said that nearly three-quarters of its 400 million dogecoins were stolen in the attack last Sunday.
Hackers made off with 280 million dogecoins, the statement by Doge Vault founder Asad Haidar said, equivalent to about $127,000 at Friday’s trading price of 0.00044585 per US dollar. However, Haidar said that that Doge Vault had recovered 120 million of the pilfered coins and transferred them to an address under their control.
Doge Vault’s system was likely compromised when the attacker gained access to the node on which the wallet’s virtual machines were stored, Haidar said, and user account information (which was stored using a one-way hashing algorithm) was probably also exposed.
“All private keys for addresses are presumed compromised,” Haidar warned. “Please do not transfer any funds to Doge Vault addresses.”
Doge Vault, previously one of the most popular wallets for the meme-inspired Dogecoin, went offline on May 11 as rumors of hacking and possible theft spread on Reddit. One Reddit user posted a screenshot showing that nearly his entire Doge Vault account balance of over 943,000 dogecoins had been transferred to another wallet, leaving just five coins in his account.
Haidar said that Doge Vault would “make every effort to refund all recovered Dogecoins to users” and that the site would release more information about the hack after it had completed its investigation.
For Dogecoin holders looking for an alternative wallet, meanwhile, Haidar recommended MultiDoge.
Dogecoin, a crypto-currency based on a wildly popular internet meme featuring the Japanese dog breed Shiba Inu, was founded in December 2013. The currency has been plagued by a rash of security problems in its infancy, however, with hackers cleaning out $16,000 worth of dogecoins from Dogewallet on Christmas Day last year before this week’s attack on Doge Vault.