Report: “Dusting” Attack On Litecoin Has Affected About 300,000 Addresses

According to a new report, a recent “dusting” attack on Litecoin (LTC) has affected 294,582 addresses. Glassnode, a company specialising in blockchain data and metrics, unveiled the latest results in its tweet. The analysis also allegedly showed an attack of a similar scale in April.

The recent $LTC dusting attack on @binance affected 294,582 addresses. During our analysis, we also uncovered a similar large–scale attack in April. pic.twitter.com/T0lMBN6VPG

— glassnode (@glassnode) 15 августа 2019 г.

“Dusting” attack on LTC occurred on August 9. In its tweet, Binance called the transaction part of an attack in which a small fraction of the coin (0.00000546 LTC) was sent to 50 addresses. James JAGER, project lead at Binance Academy and the person who first identified the attack, noted the following:

“It was network-wide, which meant it affected all users of litecoin that had an active litecoin address at the time. [...] 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.”

Jan HAPPEL, the co-founder of Glassnode, stated that the term 'dusting attack' is a fairly broad statement and the actual intent behind the attacks doesn't always align to be the same, which means the intents could have been various.

Image from Reddit