The CAPTCHA revisited

There were many news regarding CAPTCHAs recently. If you have been reading my posts, you know that Yahoo, Microsoft and Google, the big 3, had their share of problems regarding broken CAPTCHA that are based on character recognition.

According to Websense Security Labs, the account creation form for Live Hotmail at Microsoft has been the target of a mass automated botnet. With a success rate of 10% to 15% in breaking the CAPTCHA and automation, people are creating many thousand accounts every day.

Here are some samples from the Live account creation form.

  • Live CAPTCHA sample 1
  • Live CAPTCHA sample 2
  • Live CAPTCHA sample 3

There is a question that quickly arise from this situation. Are character recognition based CAPTCHAs arriving at their finish line? My personal feeling is that we are hitting a wall where CAPTCHA are getting harder and harder even for human and automated cracking services are getting better at breaking them.

As I said, CAPTCHA are good as long as we are better at solving some problems than the computer. In this case, the computer world is making some fast progress that question our uses of character recognition based CAPTCHAs.

Comments 3

  1. Keys wrote:

    A good many vualables you’ve given me.

    Posted 19 Jul 2011 at 2:00 pm
  2. dzoksck wrote:

    sv9AfN wghqrmnpddzz

    Posted 20 Jul 2011 at 8:53 am
  3. tqrxewfhq wrote:

    K4G4RZ acvbnwusisqh

    Posted 22 Jul 2011 at 6:53 am

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