Spam Bots and CAPTCHAs

(Continued from part 1.) Gather around Generals, I have hot intelligence straight from the high-tech weapons arsenal. The tide of the War Against Forum SPAM is turning.

With CAPTCHA, Spam Blacklists, and other low-grade weapons allowing the front lines of our defenses to be overrun, a new anti-SPAM weapon has hit the battlefield and initial reports are quite favorable.

Human Intelligence Thwarts The Robotic SPAM Army

As I mentioned in Part 1, forum SPAM is mostly all about links and money. Find a defensive strategy that makes it near impossible for spammers to automatically post their messages, and they’ll take their battle to places where the resistance isn’t as strong.

That weapon has been invented and it’s based upon a concept that no SPAM robot has yet been able to duplicate – Human Intelligence.

This revolutionary new weapon in the SPAM Wars uses Advanced Textual Confirmation (ATC) to challenge anyone at the point where data is submitted through a posting form. Unlike CAPTCHA, which depends upon the user entering a string of random numbers that are often so visually distorted that people can no longer decipher them, and that have been cracked by spammers anyway, ATC has an almost human-like conversation with the user.

OK, maybe conversation is a bit of an exaggeration, but the short exchange of words is just as effective as the “Halt, Who Goes There?�? challenge that military perimeter guards have been using to tell good guys from bad for hundreds of years. It’s just a bit more high-tech.

ACT works by asking a random question that humans find easy to comprehend, but powers down SPAM robots in an instant. We’re talking simple questions like “What is a color? Red, zebra, tuxedo�? You can answer that, right? Great, you must be a good guy, come on in! Are the SPAM Wars over? Not yet, but they soon might be.