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CAPTCHAs Flummox Bots, but May Be Doomed by CAPTCHA Farmers

September 2, 2008
by Joel Hruska
Blogger, Ars Technica

Joel Hruska

2008 hasn’t been the best year for CAPTCHA-based anti-spam systems; Google’s Gmail CAPTCHA was broken in February, followed by that of Hotmail in April. Researchers have fought back by incorporating images into CAPTCHAs, but this is only effective against bot-driven CAPTCHA crackers, and while automated attackers may be responsible for a majority of the CAPTCHA-breaking attempts that occur every day, they no longer account for the entirety.

Dancho Danchev, writing for ZDNet, reports on the emergence of CAPTCHA-breaking as an economic model in India. He reports that it’s impossible to untangle the corporate web that’s unfurled, given that large CAPTCHA-breaking companies often farm work out to multiple smaller businesses, but all available information suggests that CAPTCHA-cracking (referred to as “solving” in marketing parlance) is a booming sector of the Indian tech economy.

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