Glossary
Dust Attack
Sending tiny amounts of crypto to many addresses to enable on-chain heuristics or surveillance — sometimes a precursor to phishing or address-clustering analysis.
In a dust attack, the attacker sends very small amounts of crypto ("dust") to a large set of addresses. The next time the recipient consolidates UTXOs in a single transaction, that transaction reveals which addresses belong to the same wallet cluster — the attacker now has a richer surveillance picture.
Dust can also be a vector for phishing: the "from" address may be spoofed to resemble a legitimate counterparty (address poisoning), or the dust may include a memo nudging the victim toward a malicious URL. Modern wallets increasingly hide known dust by default.