The higher accuracy on Facebook is believed to be a result of Facebook’s images being of a higher resolution. They also applied the system to the Facebook image captcha and found an accuracy level of 83.5%. The researchers stated they were able to design a low-cost attack that successfully solved more than 70% of the image reCAPTCHA challenges, and each challenge required an average of only 19 seconds to solve. Security researchers at Columbia University have discovered flaws in Google’s reCAPTCHA technology that open the door for hackers to influence the risk analysis, bypass restrictions, and deploy large-scale attacks. Unfortunately, it seems the technology might not be as foolproof as once thought. In fact, reCAPTCHA is the most popular captcha provider in the world. Google’s reCAPTCHA technology is used by Google itself, Facebook and many other websites as a means of protecting against spam and abuse. It uses not only distorted text but also images and is believed to be one of the strongest captcha services. No math problems required!" #WPEProTip /bPOegSbmbzĪt some point Google took the stage and released it’s reCAPTCHA, which is now unofficially considered a captcha standard. "Google's ReCaptcha is simplest way of getting rid of bots. After the former brought a new version of captcha down, the latter would come with a newer, stronger version. It resulted in an arms race between hackers and captcha developers. The first versions of captcha were relatively easy for computers to bypass. Without the captcha technology, spammers could potentially abuse these situations by setting up numerous accounts, leaving a ridiculous number of comments, or voting an unlimited number of times in the same poll. Captcha usually comes in the form of a distorted text image that must be re-typed in order to verify you’re not a computer.Ĭaptcha technology is important because it provides simple and practical security to a variety of different things, such as protecting website registration, preventing comment spam on blogs, making sure only humans vote in online polls and more. The idea behind the captcha technology (and behind the original Turing test as well) is simple: it’s a test humans are able to pass, but online bots cannot. It turns out that captcha is an acronym for Completely Automated Public Turing test to tell Computers and Humans Apart.
Let’s start with where the word ‘captcha’ came from.