What is a Dusting Attack?

Dusting Attack refers to a new type of malicious activity when hackers or scammers try to find out the identity of the owner of a Bitcoin wallet or other cryptocurrency by sending tiny amounts of coins to their personal wallets. Then, the transactions of these wallets are tracked by attackers who perform a combined analysis of several addresses, trying to identify the owner of the wallet.

The goal is to ultimately be able to associate addresses and wallets with their respective companies or individuals. If successful, attackers can use this information against their goals, either using carefully designed phishing attacks or cyber-extortion threats.

At the end of October 2018, Samourai Wallet developers announced that some of their users had experienced Dusting attacks. The Samourai Wallet team has implemented a real-time alert for dust tracking, as well as a Do Not Spend feature that allows users to flag suspicious funds and not include them in future transactions.

If you do not use dust in your transactions, attackers cannot establish the connection necessary to “anonymize” wallets.

Despite limiting dust to 546 satoshi, today many dust attacks translate from 1,000 to 5,000 satoshi.

What is dust?

The term "dust" means a very small number of coins or tokens. This amount is simply not noticeable to most users. Usually, transactions in a couple of hundred Satoshi are considered dust.

You may have noticed that after the sale of a coin, a small part of the coins remains on the exchange, this is called exchange dust. I think she infuriates everyone, but at Binance it can be converted to BNB.



When it comes to Bitcoin, there is no official definition for dust, because each software implementation can take on different threshold values. The Bitcoin core defines dust as any result of a transaction that is lower than the fee for this transaction, which leads to the concept of dust restriction.

Technically speaking, the dust limit is calculated according to the size of the inputs and outputs, which is usually 546 Satoshi for regular Bitcoin transactions (non-SegWit) and 294 Satoshi for their own SegWit transactions. This means that any regular transaction equal to or less than 546 satoshi will be considered spam, and will likely be rejected by the checking nodes.

A source