Popular Dogecoin wallet Doge Vaultconfirmed its announcementearlier this week that it had been hacked, posting a statement on itswebsite late Thursday that said that nearly three-quarters of its 400 million dogecoinswere 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 DogeVault had recovered 120 million of the pilfered coins and transferred them toan address under their control.
DogeVault’s system was likely compromised when the attacker gained access to thenode on which the wallet’s virtual machines were stored, Haidar said, and useraccount information (which was stored using a one-way hashing algorithm) wasprobably also exposed.
“Allprivate keys for addresses are presumed compromised,” Haidar warned. “Please donot transfer any funds to Doge Vault addresses.”
Doge Vault, previously one of the mostpopular wallets for the meme-inspired Dogecoin, went offline on May 11 asrumors of hacking and possible theft spread on Reddit. One Reddit user posted a screenshotshowing that nearly his entire Doge Vault account balance of over 943,000dogecoins had been transferred to another wallet, leaving just five coins inhis account.
Haidar said that Doge Vault would “makeevery effort to refund all recovered Dogecoins to users” and that the sitewould release more information about the hack after it had completed itsinvestigation.
For Dogecoin holders looking for analternative wallet, meanwhile, Haidar recommended MultiDoge.
Dogecoin, a crypto-currency based on a wildly popular internet memefeaturing the Japanese dog breed Shiba Inu, was founded in December 2013. Thecurrency has been plagued by a rash of security problems in its infancy,however, with hackers cleaning out $16,000 worth of dogecoins from Dogewalleton Christmas Day last year before this week’s attack on Doge Vault.