The female bots received on average 100 malicious private messages a day, exceeding by far the totals of any of the other bots
Original paper: http://www.enre.umd.edu/content/rmeyer-assessing.pdfA paper by Robert Meyer and Michel Cukier, “Assessing the Attack Threat due to IRC Channels,” in Proc. International Conference on Dependable Systems and Networks (DSN06), is thought-provoking, and to me, stunning. Their Experiment 2 studied the impact of (perceived) user gender on the attack threat.
They connected silent bots to various chat rooms, differing only in whether their screen name was feminine (Cathy, Elyse, Irene, Melissa, Stephanie), masculine (Andy, Brad, Dan, Gregg, Kevin), or ambiguous (Nightwolf, Orgoth, Redwings, Stargazer), and recorded the malicious messages each received.
The female bots received on average 100 malicious private messages a day, exceeding by far the totals of any of the other bots, with the other attack types being roughly equal. It is interesting to note that the bots with ambiguous names received significantly more malicious private messages (on average 25) than the male bots (on average 3.7), but less than the average between the male and female bots (which is around 52). This experiment shows that the user gender has a significant impact on one component of the attack threat (i.e., the number of malicious private messages received for which the female bots received more than 25 times more private messages than the male bots and 4 more times than the bots with an ambiguous name).