Bitcoin Dusting Attack and its dangers

Published in

FinanceX

4 min readMay 8, 2019

What is Dust Attack?

Dusting attack is a new type of malicious activity where hackers and scammers try and break Bitcoin and electronic user privacy by sending a small amount of coins to the wallet. User’s core. Many Bitcoin professionals make transactions with the belief that their anonymity is protected from activities that attempt to infiltrate their transactions, but unfortunately not.

Definition of Dust

In the language of electronic money, dust only a small amount of coins or tokens — a small amount that people often ignore. Take Bitcoin as an example, the smallest unit of this currency is a satoshi (0.00000001 BTC) and we can consider several hundred satoshi as dust.

In other words, dust is a very small transaction or with an amount not worth sending because it is much smaller than the transaction fee. In electronic money trading, dust is also the name we assign for very small coins “stuck” and cannot be traded.

Most people don’t pay attention to dust in their wallets and rarely worry about its origin. In the past, it’s okay to not care about this small amount of money on your wallet, but by creating dusting attacks recently, we can no longer treat it.

Dusting Attack

Recent fraudsters have realized that Bitcoin users don’t pay much attention to the very small amounts of money that appear in their wallets, so they start “dusting” a large number of addresses with How to send a few satoshi. Then they begin to track those funds and all transactions of dusty wallet, allowing them to link to the addresses and eventually identify the companies or individuals behind the addresses. That wallet. The initial dusty attacks were done with Bitcoin but they are also happening with other active electronic money based on a public and transparent blockchain.

At the end of October 2018, developers for Samourai for Bitcoin announced that some of their users had been hit with dust. The company sent a warning tweet to its users and instructed how users can protect themselves. To protect users against dusty attacks, the wallet now offers real-time alerts for dust tracking as well as the “Do Not Spend” feature that allows users to mark suspicious items. and avoid using them in future transactions.

If dust stays in your wallet, the attacker cannot make the connections they need to “break anonymously” the owner of the wallet or the owner of the address. Samourai wallet has the function of automatically reporting transactions below the 564 satoshi limit, which helps provide some level of protection.

Bitcoin anonymity

Because Bitcoin is open and decentralized, anyone can set up a wallet and join the network without providing any personal information. Although all Bitcoin transactions are public and visible, it is not always easy to find the identity behind each public address or transaction. This is what helps Bitcoin to be private — though not entirely.

Peer-to-peer (P2P) transactions, transactions made between two parties (without the participation of any intermediaries), are more likely to ensure anonymity. Notably, Bitcoin users should use a one-time wallet address as a way to protect their privacy.

However, most e-money transactions are conducted through third-party exchanges, where the trader’s personal wallet will be linked to the floor’s wallet, along with the link to Their personal information. Therefore, if you participate in electronic money trading, it is important to choose a reliable and secure exchange.

Therefore, it is important to note that, unlike many people believe, Bitcoin is not really an anonymous electronic currency. In addition to the recently created dust-spreading attacks, there are many companies, research laboratories and government agencies that perform blockchain analyzes to break the blockchain anonymity.

Privacy and Security Issues

While blockchain Bitcoin is almost impossible to hack, it is a weak link in this electronic money chain. Since users do not give up their personal information when creating an account, they cannot prove theft if there are some hackers who have access to their coins — and even if they can prove it, that would also be useless.

In fact, the victim’s attempt to follow the Bitcoin theft is useless. If you keep Bitcoin in your personal wallet, ie only you have access, you act as your own bank and you cannot do anything in case you lose the key or the coin is stolen.

Security issues are becoming increasingly important. Not only for those who have something hidden but also for all of us. It is even more important for investors and traders of electronic money.

Along with dusty attacks and other anonymous attack attacks, you should also be wary of other security threats that are currently growing rapidly in electronic money space, such as Cryptojacking, Ransomware and Phishing. . Moreover, you should consider installing VPN with a reliable antivirus program for all your devices. Also be sure to encrypt your wallet and store your keys inside encrypted folders.

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