Alphabets being loved by spammers
Saturday, Aug 30th, 2008 By Nain
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Seems like a superstitious tale!! Ain’t that? According to a research, those whose names begin with A are more likely to receive spam that those who start with Z.
Richard Clayton, security expert in Cambridge University revealed this trend after analyzing logs of email traffic from demon internet and discovered that those with names higher up the alphabet are more likely to receive spam than those lower down.
The statistics of his study show that majority of email( 35 percent) email received by someone called “Andy” will be spam, compared to the 20 percent received by someone called Zadie, even though both may have the same email provider.
With this discovery, Richard has challenged previous theories which state that the section of email address after the @ symbol is more attracting for the spams.
Clayton claims that spammers rely on ‘Rumplestiltskin’ attacks, where they trawl through the dictionary, guessing at names to send spam emails too, with a high percentage turning out to be real names.
For those who trust this discovery should choose their user-names more wisely i.e. avoid user-names with alphabets higher up in order.
Also, majority of bugs in Yahoo! chat rooms start with alphabet “A” e.g Amanda, Alisha etc. I have personally experienced this.
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