CAPTCHAs Cracked by Spammers

Everyone knows those ubiquitous, squiggled, words in the text boxes at the bottom of signin/sign-up pages. Those squiggled little words, that can be very hard to read, are called CAPTCHAs (Completely Automated Public Turing test to tell Computers and Humans Apart). And CAPTCHA are for the moment still a vital security device used by companies in helping to secure our data. The purpose of the CAPTCHA itself is to authenticate someone as a human in order to not allow a computer program, most often called a Bot, to get past the security of the signin page

The general plan for a spammer would be to use a computer program to automate the process of signing up for thousands upon thousands of email accounts. Then to use those accounts to send out spam, with 99% of spam being scams of one sort or another.

What CAPTCHAs accomplish is to provide a very effective blocking mechanize against bots from setting up those spam accounts in the first place. One of the toughest problems still left to solve for computer science is that of image recognition for computer programs, and a CAPTCHA will capitalize on that because only a human will be able to read the text.

All of this is leading into a very interesting article in Computer World describing the downfall of the CATPCHA due to advances in computer algorithms utilized by spammers.

"How CAPTCHA got trashed" by Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols
http://www.computerworld.com.au/index.php/id;489635775 - Interesting Link - Blog About this in morning.