Just yesterday, we were talking about Mark Cuban’s e-mail confirmation for blogs and today Boing Boing Runs PWNTCHA: defeating CAPTCHAs with software.
CAPTCHAs (Completely Automated Public Turing test to tell Computers and Humans Apart) are the distorted text image verification boxes designed to slow down or stop spam bots.
One of my “collogues” told me how he had used this method in the past:
the easiest way may be to inline a CAPTCHA from the site you’re attacking on a site where you’re offering free porn, and get the people signing up for the free porn to solve the CAPTCHAs for you.
It’s an old trick that’s known throughout the industry.
PWNtcha - captcha decoder seems to be doing well against some of the more common captchas
while Brains and brawn
shows how his code has already beaten many test, but he’s
definitely not releasing this code until SomeBlogSite.com improves the strength of their CAPTCHA. even after that time, i probably will not release this code … just so that the bad guys will have to waste more of their own time.
The UC Berkeley Computer Vision Group note that even against the hardest tests:
given our 33% success rate, this CATPCHA would still be ineffective at filtering out “bots” since they can bombard a program with thousands of requests.
I was considering starting an open source project to defeat various catpchas, but need is not yet pressing enough.
Although if someone has already designed the code to beat the the MSN Spaces and Blogger sign-up CATPCHA, I sure wouldn’t mind using it.
Maybe Cuban’s next idea to fight “Splogs” will be a requirement that you play a game of of Arimaa just to make a post.
One Response to “Today’s Secret Word is CATPCHA”
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an open source project project would be a great idea!