Dust Tokens & Attacks
What is a Dusting attack and what are Dust tokens?
Dusting Tokens are those that are deployed to addresses for a variety of reasons and they are used to obtain and track wallet addresses.
They are used by criminals, a network or a group that target wallet addresses, usually with high balances in attempts to defraud the particular wallet owners.
They can also be used by governmental bodies to make a link to an individual or a group to a wallet and obtain identifiable data to wallet owners, these bodies include Tax and law enforcement.
What are Dusting attacks used for?
Dusting attacks have been known to be used for:
- Cyber targeted extortion
- De-anonymization of wallet owners
- Phishing scams
- Crypto ransoms
Dusting attacks can also be used by an organization that specializes in blockchain analytics to sieve through a dust attackers activities.
These attacks can also be used to carry out testing of a network and bandwidth by sending in a very short of period of time, mass dust to determine stress levels.
This can work the other way around and a vast number of transactions that are worthless are sent via dusting to slow down a particular network and cause obstruction by spam.