Virtual currency Dogecoin gets hacked at height of niche growth

By Rizza Sta. Ana

Dec 26, 2013 02:35 PM EST

Virtual wallet site Dogewallet announced on its website today that millions of virtual currency Dogecoin had been stolen on Christmas. Dogecoin is a cryptocurrency similar to Bitcoin, and what was once a joke has seen a niche growth in the financial market online.

According to the announcement, hackers had stolen around $12,000 worth of Dogecoins. VentureBeat calculated that around 21 million Dogecoins were stoeln based on the trade value of $0.00059 per coin.

The founders of Dogewallet wrote on its website, "The attack originated from the hacker gaining access to our filesystem and modifying the send/receive page to send to a static address. We're currently reviewing logs for information. The site is shut down right now."

The team of Dogewallet said it will be issuing refunds to users who had lost Dogecoin due to the attack, and will be recommending offline wallets to its customers to save its virtual currency instead.

VentureBeat said that despite the similarities of Dogecoin to Bitcoin, the currency was created as a response to an Internet meme, or a unit that carries cultural ideas, or symbols or any idealogy that spreads within a culture. Dogecoin's existence was attributed to the continuous support of a niche community on popular social networking site Reddit. It's name was said to be derived by the said Doge meme, which resembled a surprised Shiba Inu breed of a dog together with a funny internal monologue.

The report said the hack and the cryptocurrency itself indicated the fine line between a reality and a joke. Despite the creation of a satirical idea towards the hype surrounding Bitcoin, the adoption of people had helped transformed Dogecoin into another pseudo-legitimate currency that it has earlier mocked.

The report also said that the same group that attacked Dogewallet had also hacked Instadoge.net, another Dogecoin wallet site. Hacker group #team-ooga, left a message on Instadoge, which read, "That makes 30m + 500k. Thanks," referring to the volume and amount of cryptocurrency it stole from the site.

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