What is Dusting Attack?

A dusting attack occurs when a trace amount of cryptocurrency, called dust, is sent to thousands — sometimes hundreds of thousands — of wallet addresses. This attack is deployed in order to track these addresses with the hope of "un-masking" or de-anonymizing them. These mass dustings may also be used as stress tests, where a large amount of dust is quickly sent to test the throughput, or bandwidth, of a network. Some say these dustings are also a way to spam a network, by sending huge batches of worthless transactions that temporarily clog or slow down a network.