As annoying as spam is, I’ve been pretty amused lately at some of the fake names associated with messages in my spam-box. I’d thought about adding a new featurette on the blog home page listing my favorites, but then I figured that everyone sees enough of them that it might not really be worth the trouble.
Anyway, today’s NewsScan hipped me to a New York Times story on the phenomenon:
WHAT’S IN A NAME?Ever wonder how spammers come up with all those weird aliases they use
to pepper your inbox with unwanted messages? Names like Elfrieda Billman
and Beiderbecke P. Sawhorse? One possible source is a Web site run by
August Kleimo, who built a random name-generator
(www.kleimo.com/rand/name.cfm) using all the surnames from the 1990 U.S.
census (free on the Census Bureau’s Web site). Kleimo says he gets about
3,000 visitors a day, many of them hunting for unusual names to use for
fantasy gaming characters, but admits it’s possible that spammers are
picking up some ideas from his site also. Other name-generator sites
include one by Mike Campbell, a software developer and amateur etymologist.
Behind the Name (www.behindthename.com/random.html) allows visitors to
generate names in various languages, from Icelandic to classical Greek.
Chris Pound, who works in the IT department at Rice University, has written
more than 40 name generators, one of which merges names from the worlds of
Harry Potter and Dickens (www.ruf.rice.edu/~pound). Security experts say
it’s difficult to outsmart spammers who use randomly generated names that
can slip under the radar of so-called Bayesian filters, which target common
words used in spam, like Viagra. A human might detect an obviously fake
name, but “a filter can’t really see the irony of Tupperware J.
Smithington,” says ePrivacy Group’s chief privacy officer.