Do zebras get more spam than aardvarks?
p2pnet news view | Cool Stuff:- That’s the question.
The answer?
They don’t.
At least, that’s what Richard Clayton, one of the authors of Ignoring the Great Firewall of China, a Cambridge University security expert, believes.
The question in the intro is, in fact, the title of one of his papers, and the abstract explains it all, to wit »»»
Analysis of traffc logs of email received by a large UK ISP shows considerable disparity between the proportions of spam received by addresses with different first characters. This disparity is quite marked when only email addresses that appear to be ‘real’ are considered.
The root cause is likely spammers using ‘dictionary’ or ‘Rumpelstiltskin’ attacks to guess valid email addresses.
There is limited evidence for these attacks taking place in real-time, suggesting that most `fake’ email addresses were constructed sometime in the past and are now immortalised withinspammer databases.
But, can you believe Clayton?
“My PhD thesis on ‘Anonymity and Traceability in Cyberspace’ has been published as Technical Report 653,” he says, promising:
“You can trust me now! I’m a doctor!!” 
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