April 16, 2008

CAPTCHA cracked in sixty seconds

By now we have all got used to the sign up feature that is supposed determine between a human and a machine, the Completely Automated Public Turing test to tell Computers and Humans Apart (CAPTCHA) where there is a series of letters and numbers which are sometimes distorted.

Most of time this has proved a success by preventing automated sign ups for email accounts and other such services. But it would seem that this system has been broken when a group of programmers who have cracked hotmail and gmails sign up process in an average time of around sixty seconds.

But now the system has been perfected the cracking time is now down to six seconds and to prove it the system was unleashed on hotmail where it was able to sign up an amazing 1,440 email accounts in one day. This is great news for spammers who can create an unlimited amount of email accounts to work from.

Source [Ars Technica]