If you’ve ever donated to a campaign in Virginia, you’re likely getting inundated with emails and text messages as part of get-out-the-vote efforts statewide in the leadup to the November general election.
Apparently, the more you donate, the more emails you will get, according to researchers at the Virginia Tech National Security Institute.
Using artificially created IDs, the team hosted email accounts and phone numbers, signed up for candidate mailing lists and studied the interaction from November 2023 to April 2025.
“Across all the candidates we looked at regardless of political party, if we had one account that donated and other accounts that didn’t donate, we found that the donor was actually treated a lot differently,” said Jared Byers, a research associate on the study. “We found that those who donated received about two and a half times as many emails as a nondonor, and they also received more requests for more donations than a nondonor.”
The fake email addresses interacted with corporations, political candidates, news sites and more, with the goal of determining if the groups would share the information and how many emails each fake email address would receive.
Abuse of personal information typically comes in the form of sharing the email address without express permission or sending excessive numbers of spam emails.
“We all know that when we go online, we do all kinds of transactions requiring information exchange. Even just going to a website is a type of transaction,” said Alan Michaels, director of the Spectrum Dominance division. “But it’s really difficult to look back at all the transactions a person makes and determine which of those led to the spam email or malware they’re receiving now.”
The team presented their findings at Black Hat, a cybersecurity-focused research conference. The research is part of the institute’s Use and Abuse Project, a multi-year effort that includes faculty and students investigating how personal information propagates during online transactions.
The project is funded in part by the Commonwealth Cyber Initiative.
The project has engaged 130 students from 22 majors.
Share
Crystal Graham
