Dusting Attack

A dusting attack occurs when a small amount of cryptocurrency, known as dust, is sent to thousands, if not hundreds of thousands, of wallet addresses. This attack is used to track down these addresses in the hopes of “unmasking” or de-anonymizing them. These mass dustings can also be used as stress tests, in which a large amount of dust is quickly sent to test a network’s throughput or bandwidth. Some believe that these dustings are also used to spam networks by sending large batches of worthless transactions that temporarily clog or slow down networks.