Litecoin And Its Dusting Attack: What Happened And Why?

The coming altcoin news recently talk a lot about Litecoin and its dusting attack which was potentially done on August 10 and announced through the official Binance Twitter account. As the tweet notes, around 50 Binance Litecoin addresses received a fractional amount (0.00000546) of Litecoin, which was later identified by the exchange’s security team as a large-scale dusting attack.

According to James Jager who is the project lead at Binance Academy, Litecoin and its dusting attack are a major topic on the best cryptocurrency news sites. This is why he sat down to discuss the reasons behind it – and said:

“It was network-wide, which meant it affected all users of litecoin that had an active litecoin address at the time. The address of the person responsible for the dusting attack can be found here: https://blockchair.com/litecoin/address/LeEMCDHmvDb2MjhVHGphYmoGeGFvdTuk2K

“We became aware of the dusting attack on Saturday morning when one of our binance angels had received a small amount of LTC into their litecoin wallet.”

The co-founder of the blockchain data provider Glassnode, Jan Happel, also spoke about Litecoin and its dusting attack. He looked into it to confirm it and focused on the extra data which came up, showing a previously unreported dusting attack which occurred in April this year. As Happel said:

“We have done a quick query into the LTC blockchain and analyzed the number of utxo’s that carry a smaller value than the mean tx fee that day. If a UTXO contains less balance than the minimum amount required to spend it (fee) that day, it becomes stuck/unspendable — this is what we technically define as dust.”

For those of you unfamiliar with dusting attacks, the altcoin news present them as a signature assigned to any unspent value (through UTXO which is the unspent transaction output) – merged to make the transaction amount.

This was the first time a large scale attack like this had occurred. Litecoin and its dusting attack were also explained by Jager as:

“The person behind the dusting attack owns a mining pool based out of Russia, EMCD[dot]io. They reached out to express that their intent was to advertise their mining pool to the users of Litecoin, however, it’s unclear from our perspective or anyone else’s as to whether there were alternative motives. The owner of the pool was not aware that he was subjecting all these users to a dusting attack and spreading fear among the Litecoin community.

“It’s interesting to note, that even if this was not the intent of the mining pool owner, he provided a base for malicious actors to analyze. You see, the person responsible for conducting the dusting attack doesn’t necessarily have to be the one collecting the data, they can just merely be providing a service so that someone else can collect all the information and analyze it at a later date.”

Even though they seem like a small and unharmful activity, dusting attacks can undermine user anonymity and be used against users to steal precious digital assets.