Study: Certain e-mail addresses attract more Spam attacks

A new study has revealed that the unique user address chosen when creating a personal e-mail account can play a significant role in making that account more or less susceptible to Spam attacks.

The research study, which was carried out by University of Cambridge computer scientist Dr. Richard Clayton, found an interesting attack pattern after analysing more than 500 million Spam e-mail messages.

Dr. Clayton’s research discovered that the very first letter of a person’s e-mail address can influence how much Spam their inbox receives, with accounts beginning with the letters “A”, “M”, “S”, “R” or “P” attracting 40 percent junk mail while accounts beginning with the letters “Q”, “Y” or “Z” attract 20 percent or less.

“Measuring incoming email has shown that the first letter of email addresses makes a difference to the proportion of incoming spam,” explained Dr. Clayton at a recent Mountain View, California conference on e-mail and anti-Spam measures.

According to the study, the percentage discrepancy can be partly attributed to the execution of “dictionary” attacks, a process whereby spammers increase the probability of success by attaching live e-mail name prefixes (before the @ part of the address) to other popular domain addresses (after the @ part of the address).

For example, a known account called Michael@email-account.com would lead to the creation of mails for other accounts such as Michael@another-email-account.com, and so-on, which would likely garner a greater number of account hits for the attacker.

Of course, the amount of address names beginning with the letters “A”, “M”, “S”, “R” or “P” is obviously likely to be far greater than those beginning with “Q”, “Y” or “Z”, which is also likely a contributing factor.

However, that being said, Dr. Clayton suggested in his report that more pattern research is required -- not least because accounts beginning with “U”, a letter relatively uncommon at the start of e-mail addresses, were recorded as receiving 50 percent Spam mail.

The 550 million e-mail messages analysed by the study had been sent to customers of Internet service Demon between Feb 01 and March 27 of 2008, reports the BBC.

by Stevie Smith - Sep 2 2008, 13:00