Doggone Shame: Millions of Bitcoin Alternative Dogecoin Stolen in Christmas Hack

The founders of Dogewallet, a storage system for the Bitcoin alternative Dogecoin, have confirmed a hack that may have cost owners of the currency over $12,000. Reports of the hack first began gathering pace at the Dogecoin forum, where users reported their funds were being sent to a wallet without their authorization. In separate posts on Reddit’s Dogecoin page and the dogewallet.com front page, the founders explained the issue.

It appears the hack didn't target individual accounts, but rather the official Dogewallet page, which was modified to ensure that all transactions were sent to a single account, rather than their intended recipients. "The attack originated from the hacker gaining access to our filesystem and modifying the send/receive page to send to a static address," the Dogecoin Reddit account explained in a post on the site, "we're currently reviewing logs for information. The site is shut down right now."

Dogecoin is a very new digital currency. Set up as an alternative to Bitcoin, it takes its name from the Shiba Inu "doge" meme. Thankfully, at roughly $0.00059 per coin, it's worth a tiny fraction of Bitcoin, which as of writing is valued at over $700 per coin. Because of that, the millions of Dogecoins that were stolen only have a combined value of around $12,000. Dogewallet's founders say those accounts affected will be compensated, and asks owners to contact them in a private message on Reddit.