What is a dust attack?

A Dust attack is a scenario whereby an attacker sends tiny amounts of bitcoin (dust) to an address. It is a coordinated attack usually sent to numerous addresses, often thousands of them at a time. This kind of attack is not harmful initially when the dust sits in the address and as such the victim might ignore them but when the victim spends the dust together with other UTXOs present in their wallet(if the wallet automatically includes UTXOS during transactions), the attacker can analyze the transactions and have the leverage of linking multiple addresses together and deanonymizing the user.

Diagrammatic representation:

Why dust attacks are initiated

- Linking of wallets Chain analysis companies can initiate such to deanonymize wallets and be able to link certain wallets to a real person.

- Phishing attack:Can serve as a conception phase to a social engineering/ phishing attack as scammers can include OP_RETURN messages of links to phishing sites which can lead to assets loss if victims are lured to the sites having read and believed the message.

Illustrating this attack

Protective Measures against dust attacks
- Use of modern wallets: Thankfully, some modern wallets like electrum has features that allows you to mark the dust input as "Do Not Spend" which would prevent you from accidentally spending them in the future.

- Migrate funds: You can choose to create a new wallet and migrate other inputs to a new address, leaving the dust behind.

-Using COIN CONTROL features: You can opt to use COIN CONTROL feature to enable you manually select the UTXOs to spend, although this is an advanced feature and needs good understanding to use it.

Contributions and corrections are highly welcome Cool

Emjay24

Posts

Merits