Dusting Attack
Sending tiny amounts of an asset to many addresses so the sender can watch how those amounts later move and link addresses to one owner.
On networks that use unspent transaction outputs, a wallet combines several outputs when it spends, and analysis firms treat inputs to a single transaction as probably belonging to one owner. Dust exploits that heuristic: if the victim ever spends the dust alongside their other coins, the dusted address is linked to the rest of the wallet, and from there potentially to an identified exchange deposit. A second variant sends unsolicited tokens whose name or metadata advertises a website, with the goal of luring the recipient into connecting a wallet to a malicious page. Defenses are coin control features that let a user mark specific outputs as unspendable, and simply ignoring unknown tokens rather than interacting with them.
En pratique
Wallets with coin control let users exclude specific dust outputs from future transactions so those outputs are never merged with the rest of the balance.
Le malentendu courant
That receiving dust means the wallet has been compromised, when the sender only knows a public address and the real risks are loss of privacy or being lured to a scam site.