Follow up: Almost 300,000 Addresses Hit in Binance Dusting Attack Launched Against Litecoin

The exchange had made a statement through a tweet on their social media account, on August 9, claiming that there had been a significant attack on the altcoin the previous day: “Approximately 5 hours ago, there was a large-scale dusting attack on $LTC @Litecoin users.”  

This tweet had linked this attack with a previous transaction that involved sending a fraction of Litecoin (0.00000546 LTC which is approximately 0.04 cents at the time of this report) of a coin to 50 addresses.  

Furthermore, the tweet issued by the Exchange also explained the concept behind a dusting attack by saying:  

“A dusting attack refers to a relatively new kind of malicious activity where hackers and scammers try and break the privacy of Bitcoin and cryptocurrency users by sending tiny amounts of coins to their personal wallets.”  

Co-founder of blockchain data provider Glassnode, Jan Happel had taken a thorough look into the situation and to ascertain the level of damage done. Although the Exchange had stated that only 50 wallets were attacked, Happel was of the impression that the extent of the attack was much more than that, as almost 300,000 LTC addressed was said to have shown signs of dusting. It was also discovered that this wasn’t the first time this kind of attack was launched, as it had occurred earlier this year in April according to a report.

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.”  

The graph shown in the tweet from Glassnode below was quite explicit on the details of the volume of the attack.