Nearly 300,000 addresses affected by LTC dusting attack on Binance

294,582 addresses were affected when Litecoin suffered a major dusting attack on Binance. Blockchain data and metrics firm Glassnode revealed the numbers while also stating that a similar scale attack happened back in April. The attack was first identified by James Jager, project lead at Binance Academy, who told Cointelegraph:

“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"

The Binance Academy explained a dusting attack as such:

“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. The transactional activity of these wallets is then tracked down by the attackers, who perform a combined analysis of several addresses as an attempt to identify the person or company behind each wallet.”

Jan Happel, the co-founder of Glassnode, gave more insight about the dusting attack:

“The term 'dusting attack' is a fairly broad statement and the actual intent behind the attacks don't necessarily always align to be the same. 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.”