Unmasking Anonymous Email Senders

alphadogg writes "Just because you send an email anonymously doesn't mean people can't figure out who you are anymore. A new technique developed by researchers at Concordia University in Quebec could be used to unmask would-be anonymous emailers by sniffing out patterns in their writing style from use of all lowercase letters to common typos. Their research, published in the journal Digital Investigation, describes techniques that could be used to serve up evidence in court, giving law enforcement more detailed information than a simple IP address can produce."

Comments

Pretty print it first

[gatkinso]

run it thru pretty print or some other formatter before sending it.

Re:Pretty print it first

[Anonymous Coward]

They seriously think an 80% success rate is good enough to be used in court?

I'm betting the real reason is so they can go to a judge with their pseudo-evidence to get a warrant for more invasive spying.

Re:Pretty print it first

[Anonymous Coward]

According to Wikipedia an 80% success rate is good enough for most civil cases, and indictment for criminal cases. These are best off a "preponderance of the evidence," or "more likely than not" standard (>50%). Criminal case decisions are based on a standard of "clear and convincing evidence," but 80% would be more than enough to get them in the door.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Legal_burden_of_proof#Examples

Re:Pretty print it first

[OzPeter]

run it thru pretty print or some other formatter before sending it.

Nah .. run it twice though Google translate

Nah .. ejecutarlo dos veces a través de Google Translate

Nah .. twice run through Google Translate

Re:Pretty print it first

[spun]

"It's not a lie if _you_ believe it."

In totally unrelated news, my dick is a foot long.

Well I'd like to see that stand up in court.

For the lulz

[burnit999]

Sooo... if I want to write an anonymous letter I just switch from my usual grammar natzi mode to my OMFG i c4/Vz p0ns0r your org MANNNN!

E E Cummings, that blatant spammer

[SMoynihan]

Turns out most spam is written by e e cummings.

Who'd have thought it?

Finally, they can find that one guy

[_0xd0ad]

who always types part of the body of his message in the subject line.

Simple

[LWATCDR]

Use Google translate. Translate it into Spanish, then into German, then back into English, then into LEET.

It should be simple to obscure the style and weaknesses of the author with this method.

This is why I cut & paste

[dim5]

This is why I cut & paste each word of anonymous emails from an online dictionary.

Untraceable.

The digital equivilent of cutting up magazines.

[sumdumass]

It used to be that people would cut words from magazines and other papers to make ransom notes so no one could recognize their hand writing.

With this concept moving to the computer and internet, it will be trivial to find words, phrases, auto generation scripts and so on to do the digital equivalent. In fact, I think there are several programs out there that will pull random lines of text from several sources on the internet, take a real message and create a image of some sort to lay information over top of it, all just to get around spam filters. (disable the display of image in your email and you will be surprised at what is underneath them sometimes).

But something I can see this really having a problem with is how easy it might make the chance at setting someone else up to take a fall. Suppose you and I have emailed each other for quite some time now. I saved all our correspondence and farmed them to find phrases and word misspellings, cut and pasted them to make statements you never intended to make, then sent them off to threaten the president. Something even more disturbing, suppose we know each other in real life and I have the hots for your wife. I make my way into your house, plant some pipes and fertilizer beside some diesel fuel in one of your closets, get on your computer, sign up for a free email address from it using fake information and start spamming chat rooms and emailing government officials your intent to kill the president.

The actual research paper

[Sara Chan]

The actual research paper is at

http://www.dfrws.org/2008/proceedings/p42-iqbal.pdf

Note that it was published in 2008. So Slashdot is reporting relatively quickly here.