Issue |
EPL
Volume 84, Number 2, October 2008
|
|
---|---|---|
Article Number | 28004 | |
Number of page(s) | 5 | |
Section | Interdisciplinary Physics and Related Areas of Science and Technology | |
DOI | https://doi.org/10.1209/0295-5075/84/28004 | |
Published online | 13 October 2008 |
Correlations and Omori law in spamming
1
Department of Information Engineering and CNISM, Second University of Naples - 81031 Aversa (CE), Italy, EU
2
Department of Physical Sciences, University of Naples Federico II, INFN and Coherentia - 80126 Napoli, Italy, EU
Corresponding author: picaciam@na.infn.it
Received:
31
July
2008
Accepted:
12
September
2008
The most costly and annoying characteristic of the e-mail communication system is the large number of unsolicited commercial e-mails, known as spams, that are continuously received. Via the investigation of the statistical properties of the spam delivering intertimes, we show that spams delivered to a given recipient are time correlated: if the intertime between two consecutive spams is small (large), then the next spam will most probably arrive after a small (large) intertime. Spam temporal correlations are reproduced by a numerical model based on the random superposition of spam sequences, each one described by the Omori law. This and other experimental findings suggest that statistical approaches may be used to infer how spammers operate.
PACS: 89.75.Da – Systems obeying scaling laws / 89.20.Hh – World Wide Web, Internet / 05.45.Tp – Time series analysis
© EPLA, 2008
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