How to Avoid a Dusting Attack

The term “dusting attack” refers to fraudulent actions that try to find out the owner’s personal information so that they can blackmail them. These kinds of things happen because digital assets are weak and, in particular, because there isn’t enough privacy. Below, we’ll talk about what kind of process it is, what it’s used for, who uses it, and how it’s used.

Dusting Attack: What Is It?

All cryptocurrency transactions are recorded in the blockchain, so anyone can look at them. If an attacker uses certain tricks to find out who owns the wallet, he gets information about all of his transactions (direction of transfers, amount, etc.). These attempts to find out who you are are called “dusting attacks.”

The word “dusty” shows how small transactions are, which is why many people who own tokens or coins don’t pay much attention to them. In Bitcoin, we talk about Satoshi, which is the same as 0.0000001 BTC. “dusting” can be up to 100-1000 Satoshi, which isn’t more than the transaction fee and is paid during the transaction.

This group also includes small funds that can’t be traded because they are stuck on the exchange. Before attackers learned how to use ways to find out who a user is, no one paid attention to these kinds of amounts.

“Dusting attack” is a well-known term in the field of cryptography. It is often used when exchanging money. Representatives of the Binance exchange wrote down these kinds of things for the first time in 2018-2019. They were able to figure out what was going on with the Litecoin cryptocurrency and its owners.

Theoretically, a dusting attack could be done with any digital asset, but most of the time, it happens with popular coins like Ethereum or Bitcoin. Attackers want their victims to finish the transaction as quickly as possible so that they can get what they want.

How it works: different schemes

People don’t pay attention to small transactions, which makes dusting attacks possible. Many people don’t even notice when small amounts are added to their wallets. This lets scammers get what they want. Once dusting is stored, operations can be tracked, linked, and details about the recipients can be figured out. This method can also be used to put more stress on the network. Think about the dusting attack principle for each case on its own.

Spam attacks

One of the attackers’ goals might be to attack the network in order to stop operations and get more money from commissions.

Here’s how it works:

• The attacker does a lot of boring operations that get put into the mempool and wait for confirmation.
• As the number of these kinds of transactions goes up, the miners get more work, and they don’t have time to finish it all in a short amount of time. Users who want to make a transfer have to wait or pay a higher fee so that the transfer can be made faster.
• To make things work better, attackers raise the commission, which means that their transactions are processed first. Normal users have to wait for confirmation for a long time or pay even more for a transaction.

The goal of a dusting attack is to make people less trusting of the network and less happy with it. Because of this, people start to get rid of a certain cryptocurrency, which makes the rate go down. This method doesn’t work for Bitcoin because the price of the cryptocurrency has gone up a lot and the high commissions make it expensive to use the idea.

How to Keep Yourself Safe

A lot of people who make crypto wallets have built in protections whose main purpose is to warn people about these kinds of attacks. For example, such options are marked in the Samourai Wallet storage, which lets the owner handle the situation in time. When you use the function, you can immediately let people know about transfers of up to 546 satoshi.