Dust Attack.

A dust attack sends tiny amounts of cryptocurrency to many wallets so that, when the recipients later spend the dust, on-chain analysts can cluster and de-anonymize the addresses. It belongs to the Web3 & Blockchain category of cybersecurity.

A dust attack sends tiny amounts of cryptocurrency to many wallets so that, when the recipients later spend the dust, on-chain analysts can cluster and de-anonymize the addresses.

In a dust attack, an actor floods many wallet addresses with economically negligible 'dust' (fractions of a satoshi or wei). The dust itself is harmless, but if a wallet aggregates inputs across UTXOs or addresses, the dust co-spends reveal common ownership and let analysts merge clusters in the address graph. Dust attacks are used by chain-analysis firms, law enforcement, advertisers, and adversaries to map exchange customers, identify high-value targets, or unmask privacy-coin users. Modern wallets defend with coin-control, automatic dust filtering, separate accounts per purpose, and integration with privacy tools that avoid combining tainted UTXOs.

Defences for Dust Attack typically combine technical controls and operational practices, as detailed in the full definition above.

Common alternative names include: Crypto dusting, Dusting attack.