Dusting Attack

A dusting attack sends trivially small amounts of cryptocurrency to many addresses in the hope that recipients later co-spend the dust, exposing links between their addresses.

A dusting attack exploits clustering heuristics against their intended owners. The attacker distributes economically negligible amounts — dust — to a large set of addresses. If a recipient later spends that dust alongside their other coins, common-input ownership merges those addresses into one entity, letting the attacker attribute and track wallets that were meant to stay separate. Intelligence platforms flag dust deposits so analysts can exclude them from a clean counterparty graph and avoid false clustering. Users defend by marking dust as do-not-spend, keeping it out of any transaction that would reveal the link.