Dusting attack
In short A dusting attack sends tiny amounts of crypto or junk tokens to many wallets to track their owners or lure them into scams.
A dusting attack is when someone sends very small amounts of crypto, called dust, to a large number of addresses. The amounts are too small to matter financially. The point is either to watch what happens next or to plant something in your wallet that leads you into a trap.
The original form targets privacy. On UTXO chains like Bitcoin, if you later spend the dust together with your other coins in one transaction, an observer can link those addresses as belonging to the same owner, which helps deanonymize you. On account-based chains like Ethereum, BNB Chain, and Solana, the more common version is a scam drop: unknown tokens or NFTs land in your wallet with a name that points to a website, and that site is a drainer waiting for you to connect and sign. A related trick, address poisoning, sends zero-value or tiny transfers from an address that looks like one you use, hoping you copy it from your history next time you send funds.
It matters because the dust itself is harmless until you act on it. Trying to sell a random token can mean visiting a fake site or approving a malicious contract, and some scam tokens are built so you cannot sell them at all. Copying an address from your transaction history can send real funds straight to the attacker.
The safe move is to ignore tokens you did not expect. Most wallets let you hide them, and on Solana you can close empty token accounts to recover rent. Do not visit sites named in token names or memos. Always copy recipient addresses from a trusted source and check the full address, not just the first and last few characters.