Full Circle Associates

COLLEGE PARK, Md. -- A study by the University of Maryland's A. James Clark School of Engineering found that chat room participants with female usernames received 25 times more threatening and/or sexually explicit private messages than those with male or ambiguous usernames.

Female usernames, on average, received 163 malicious private messages a day in the study, conducted by Michel Cukier, assistant professor in the Center for Risk and Reliability in the Clark School's Department of Mechanical Engineering, and an affiliate of the university's Institute for Systems Research, and sophomore computer engineering student Robert Meyer.

The study focused on internet relay chat or IRC chat rooms, which are among the most popular chat services but offer widely varying levels of user security. The researchers logged into various chatrooms under female, male and ambiguous usernames, counted the number of times they were contacted and tracked the contents of those messages. Their results will be published in the proceedings of the Institute of Electronics and Electrical Engineers International (IEEE) Conference on Dependable Systems and Networks (DSN '06) in June.

'Some messages to female usernames were innocuous, while others were sexually explicit or threatening,' Meyer says. Harmless messages included 'helo' and 'care 2 intro?' Tamer examples of malicious messages included suggestive questions such as,'feeling horney?'and requests for 'intimate services.'

The researchers also determined that simulated users or 'bots' are not behind most of the malicious messages. 'The extra attention the female usernames received and the nature of the messages indicate that male, human users specifically targeted female users,' Cukier said."