Porn Rewards Users To Get Past Anti-Spam Captchas

Stalke writes "Spammers are now usings a new technique to circumvent the 'captchas,' the distorted text in graphics, that users must input to receive the free email account. The spammers have cracked the system by displaying the 'captchas' on free porn sites in real time. Since there are always a large number of people signing up for free porn, they do the work of decripting the 'captchas' which is then replayed back into the spammers program to create a new email account. Who thought that porn could be a hacking technique!" Sure sounds plausible, though the link here says only "someone told me."

Comments

Re:Easily countered

[Violet Null]

Wouldn't matter.

Automated spam script goes to sign up new email address, gets presented captcha. Downloads captcha -- as the server would expect any normal web browser to do.

Captcha is copied to some location. Filename probably contains information that can identify the specific script that's running, since there'll undoubtedly be many going simultaneously.

From that point, there's about 20 minutes, give or take, for the porn site to display the copy of the captcha and ask for the user's input. On a site seeing any amount of traffic at all, that should be more than enough.

Once a user has given input, the spam script is notified, and sends the input back to the captcha server. The captcha server never sees the IP address of the human -- it only deals with the spam script -- so it'll never know anything's up.

Re:Sounds like rubbish

[Z-MaxX]

Two reasons this sounds like rubbish: The catchups are generated on a per session basis for the person trying to sign up for the email address . Surely if they then try and get a third party to do the decoding the session will be expired.

Not neccesarily. From the writeup:

by displaying the 'captchas' on free porn sites in real time.

If you have thousands of visitors every hour, then you only have to wait a few seconds on average to have your image shown to a user and a few more seconds for the user to respond.

Old news and incorrect data

[shaftek]

This is ancient news, it has been mentioned by me on the ASRG list in November and on my blog. The original new article was published by the Post Gazette, and found by Matt McCay in his blog. Liudvikas Bukys mentioned it in his blog also. You might also want to take a look at the W3C draft on why these visual tests do not work for disabled people. And to end this off, the basic premise of C/R is that the return address is valid. Even if spammers break these visual tests, in order to do that, they must have a valid return address - ergo, making them traceable.