Spam Bots and CAPTCHAs

According to the hmm… press-release (formally, it’s a blog entry, but the style is very press-releasish), the Yahoo CAPTCHA is broken.

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I already wrote about The best CAPTCHA ever — it’s a simple, but impressive looking math expression. Use of a scientific CAPTCHA is taking off. Now you can see one on the registration page of the library of Moscow Institute of Physics and Technology:

Translation:

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You’ve probably heard of the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C); it’s is an “international consortium where member organizations, a full-time staff, and the public work together to develop Web standards.

According to their web site, their mission is:

“To lead the World Wide Web to its full potential by developing protocols and guidelines that ensure long-term growth for the Web.”

Well, lately they have been working hard to lead the web away from CAPTCHA, and with good reason. According to this article on their web site, CAPTCHA is giving webmasters a “false sense of security.”

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Good job! You’ve built a great web site that’s going to attract a lot of visitors. But before you start counting all of that money you plan to make, take a moment to meet Mr. FUD.

Yep, good old Fear, Uncertainty, and Doubt is about to step into your life if you’re thinking about adding a CAPTCHA gateway to your registration or message forms. Here are two reasons why:

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Every now and then a smart anti-SPAM solution comes along that’s actually worth taking a close look at. ReCAPTCHA™ is one of those tools.

Everyone who reads my blog already knows that standard CAPTCHA utilities have been hacked. And you already know that the best form-based anti-SPAM tools require a modicum of human intelligence to unlock the comments form and allow a comment to be posted.

And that’s why I’m so excited about ReCAPTCHA. Not only is it human intelligence-based, but it’s free as well. And to make it even better, if you use ReCAPTCHA, you’ll actually be helping to spread literacy around the world.

Here’s how it works:

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CAPTCHA or not CAPCTHA… Any anti-spam protection disturbs your visitors. But folks at HotCaptcha.com found a nice trick to compensate the irritating proof-you-are-a-human step. What they do?

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Just stumbled upon the article “Using AI to beat CAPTCHA and post comment spam”. There is a number of projects related to breaking CAPTCHAs and a number of articles on the topic, but this article strikes me most, because of:

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Recently I analyzed HotScripts.com section “PHP :: Scripts and Programs :: Security Systems”. Looking through the all 9 pages, I identified 5 categories:

* CAPTCHAs,
* crawler protection,
* login, users, groups, roles, rights, authentification,
* data encryption,
* PHP and HTML source code encryption.

As one expects, the biggest category is “CAPTCHAs”. But how to select the best one?

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I already wrote about the CAPTCHA I like most. Just to repeat, here it is:

Recently I found a very nice collection, don’t miss it: Craziest Captchas on the Web.

CAPTCHA has been broken. Not just once, but over and over again. In fact, do a search for “CAPTCHA breaker” or “CAPTCHA hack” and you’ll find plenty of web sites that are all too happy to tell spammers how to get around the image tokens that CAPTCHA scripts use to try to keep unwanted people out.

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