Research Method Can Expose Anonymous Email Authors

Researchers say they have developed a technique to determine the authorship of anonymous emails.

The researchers, from Concordia University in Montreal, based this method on speech recognition and data mining techniques. It relies upon the identification of frequent patterns of unique features that recur in a suspect's emails.

The motivation behind the study is the rapid increase in cybercrime. Identity theft, which was recently named by the Federal Trade Commission as the top consumer complaint of 2010, is often committed by sending malware via anonymous emails.

"In the past few years, we've seen an alarming increase in the number of cybercrimes involving anonymous emails," said study co-author Benjamin Fung, a professor of Information Systems Engineering at Concordia University and an expert in data mining, in a statement. "These emails can transmit threats or child pornography, facilitate communications between criminals or carry viruses."

Usually, police officers are able to use the IP address to locate the house or apartment where an email came from. However, nabbing a suspect from there is not that easy. Often IP addresses come from a place which has several residents, such as an apartment complex. Thus to determine if a suspect is guilty or not, the researchers identify the patterns found in emails written by the subject. They then filter out any of these patterns which are also found in the emails of other suspects. What's left is what the researchers say is the "write-print." This is a distinctive identifier like a fingerprint.