On Tuesday, Doge Vault, one of the most popular online repositories for the cryptocurrency Dogecoin, formally acknowledged that it had been hacked two days earlier.

On the 11th of May, the Doge Vault online wallet service was compromised by attackers, resulting in a service disruption and tampering with wallet funds, the site wrote.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.

While Doge Vault hasnt officially said how much was lost, a newly created Dogecoin wallet shows that 121,550,030 dogecoins have been transferred into it over the last 24 hours. At present exchange rates, thats worth about $56,000.

The company did not immediately respond to further questions, nor did it provide additional details about who the perpetrators might be.

Dogecoin first debuted in December 2013. Unlike Bitcoin and other altcoins, Dogecoin has no hard cap as to how many coins will be mined. It's just the latest cryptocurrency to suffer from attacks that pilfer wallets from exchanges and end users. Recently, such attacks have become extremely commonas a result of people failing to heed best practices that dictate only a small amount of currency should be stored in 'hot' wallets. In fact, the growth of cryptocurrency theft in recent years has even led to attacks becoming an automated feature of some botnets.

For a more detailed account of how such pilfering attacks operate, Ars covered a similar incident that happened to Bitcoinia in 2012.

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Such hack, much sad: Doge Vault reportedly loses $56,000 in heist