CAPTCHA's That Kill - Guaranteed Hacker-Proof

Wednesday, November 19th @ 8:19 AMpost viewed 49 times

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For the funny stuff, if you already know about CAPTHCA's, skip to the bottom of this article.

If you've never heard of CAPTCHA's, you've probably seen them. They are the images that you encounter when submitting web-based forms that contain some characters or numbers you have to enter into one of the fields in order to complete the process. The reasoning is that many spammers now use programs that can automatically fill out web forms to add their spam to blogs or register new webmail accounts at places like Yahoo.

The term CAPTCHA is an acronym for a test developed at Carnegie Mellon University for Yahoo (click HERE for a lot more info). The acronym is the short form for - Completely Automated Turing Test to Tell Computers and Humans Apart (actually CAPTTTCHA).

Many CAPTCHA schemes have been broken by increasingly complex computer algorithms used by hackers. But the biggest weakness is that hackers can employ low-cost labor on the Internet to actually use human intelligence to break them in real-time.

So, the CAPTCHA concept as it exists now, is not likely to be the best solution for the long term. You will eventually end up with images like the one in the link below...

This cartoon (click HERE) is a great hyperbole that takes CAPTCHA's to the extreme.

 

Scott Wright
The Streetwise Security Coach

http://www.streetwise-security-zone.com

Phone: 1-613-693-0997
Email: scott@streetwise-security-zone.com
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