Internet Security and Programming

Spammers have made great strides this past year in defeating CAPTCHAs, the distorted text used as a security test to ensure a person and not a machine is behind a computer screen. But automated programs that spammers use to thwart CAPTCHAs still aren’t nearly as successful as the practice of hiring thousands of people to do nothing but remotely and solve the puzzles for clients. This is the business model behind anti-captcha.com, a subscription service that offers spammers a cheap way to solve CAPTCHAs, or “Completely Automated Public Turing test to tell Computers and Humans Apart.” Google, Yahoo and other e-mail and Web service providers employ CAPTCHAs to stop spammers and other bad guys from using automated processes to create hundreds or thousands of fake accounts. Those new accounts, of course, are not logged yet by anti-spam filters, so they give spammers a new platform to deliver their garbage. [...]

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