What is a dusting attack?
- Author
- CRYPTO PORT Editorial
- Published
- Updated
- Reading time
- 4 min
In short
A dusting attack sprinkles tiny amounts of coin across many addresses, then watches where those amounts move in order to link addresses to a single owner. Receiving dust cannot drain you by itself, but spending it together with your real funds reveals which addresses belong to the same person. The default response is to leave it alone.
Key points
- Tiny transfers sent purely so their movement can be traced
- Simply receiving dust does not put your funds at risk
- Spending it alongside real funds is what links addresses
- The goal is usually deanonymisation or scam targeting
Definition
Sending negligible amounts to a large number of addresses and analysing where that value later moves, in order to infer which addresses share an owner or connect to a known exchange account.
Everything on a public chain is readable, but an address alone says nothing about who holds it. Scattering trivial amounts and watching when they are later spent together with other balances is a way around that: if several addresses are drawn on in one transaction, the same person very likely controls all of them.
Motives vary. Analytics firms and investigators use the technique, and so do fraud groups looking for wallets that are actively used and therefore worth targeting. In the second case, dust is often followed by unsolicited tokens, fake reward notices or a message posing as support.
The practical answer is to ignore small amounts you did not expect and never spend them. Some wallets let you mark specific balances as unspendable so they are never bundled into a transaction. Keeping separate receiving addresses for separate purposes also limits how much one successful link reveals.
Watch out for
- · Never spend unexplained small balances — leave them where they are
- · Ignore any memo, link or site address attached to the dust
- · Use separate receiving addresses for separate purposes so one link reveals less