The smallest unit of Bitcoin is 0.00000001 BTC (1 satoshi). This is such a small amount that most people wouldn't even notice it in their wallet. However, receiving a small amount of satoshi for no reason is 99% "Dust Attack". It is absolutely unlikely that someone will send you a transaction to your address by mistake.
Is Dust Attack dangerous for your Bitcoins? From a certain point of view, no. Nothing can happen to your funds (your seed and private key are safe!). However it could become dangerous later or on the level of anonymity.
But who is sending these 100/200 satoshi in the wallets of strangers? These are scammers or tracking companies. Or it could even be the state that is investigating you!
Bitcoin is semi-anonymous. This means that scammers or analytics companies, thanks to this attack, could have valuable information about you. As? Transactions follow and link them to your other addresses.
If successful, scammers can use this knowledge to carry out phishing attacks or cyber-extortion threats via email for example.
ATTACK TECHNIQUES
-The attacker sends satoshis to an address with a positive balance. In reality the attacker does not get any advantage, since the movements of the address could also be monitored previously. The only advantage could be that of "accustoming" the user to receiving funds on an address, thus making him less cautious in the real dust attack.
-The attacker sends satoshis to an empty address. If the recipient starts to use that wallet, maybe he will aggregate those satoshis and send them to his main address. At that point the old address and the new one could be "linked" and the attacker can, with chain analysis methods, try to trace your identity.
Of course, even the faucets, where we also use an email address, can de-anonymize your main wallet.
Even a scam exchange offering you $ 10 of a shitcoin, asking for the KYC, is practicing a Dust Attack. Only in that case it can track even more efficiently by having all your data.
Until a few months ago it was possible to distinguish between "anonymous" BTC and "KYC" BTC which must never be mixed, under penalty of de-anonymisation of all Bitcoins. Today it's a bit more difficult because everyone is asking for the KYC.
When you receive a Dust Attack, register for an exchange scam or otherwise provide personal data, you must be careful not to fall into phishing or extortion attempts.
