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Have Spammers Overcome the CAPTCHA?

Posted by kdawson on from the turing-in-his-grave dept.

thefickler writes "It appears that spammers have found a way to automatically create Hotmail and Yahoo email accounts. They have already generated more than 15,000 bogus Hotmail accounts, according to security company BitDefender. The company says that a new threat, dubbed Trojan.Spammer.HotLan.A, is using automatically generated Yahoo and Hotmail accounts to send out spam email, which suggests that spammers have found a way to overcome Microsoft's and Yahoo's CAPTCHA systems."

6 of 330 comments (clear)

  1. Quick! by QuantumG · · Score: 5, Funny

    Get the rest of the difficult AI problems into CAPTCHAs. We've finally figured out a way to finance AI research!

    --
    How we know is more important than what we know.
  2. 500 accounts created every hour? by patio11 · · Score: 5, Insightful

    That doesn't sound like a CAPCHA has been broken, except perhaps by the sophisticated AI device known as a human being. 8 and a half CAPCHAs a minute? No problem for one person with a tolerance for boredom and CTS. Heck, you can even put the job up on Amazon Turk and charge a penny an account for the signups, or use cheap labor in any of a number of countries to do it.

    --
    Help poke pirates in the eyepatch, arr.
  3. FREE PR0N! by pq · · Score: 5, Insightful
    Get the rest of the difficult AI problems into CAPTCHAs. We've finally figured out a way to finance AI research!
    Not really.

    The way they've worked around it probably goes like this: "Free pr0n sets! See more of this hot chick! We don't want automated downloads of these sets, so you need to solve this code to get the download. What? It looks just like the hotmail cpachas? Yeah, we're using the same advanced technology here."

    So I guess this approach would also solve other AI problems - by having bored RIs solve them. Maybe not such a bad solution after all?

    --
    "I will take the Ring," he said, "though I do not know the way."
  4. Too bad MS ignores RFC 2821 by Kadin2048 · · Score: 5, Informative

    One of the (many) things I hate about Hotmail is that Microsoft blatantly ignores anything sent to its postmaster and abuse addresses, so there's really no way to notify them of spam being spewed from their system. In fact, if you send a message to postmaster@hotmail.com, they send back a pretty snarky response telling you that nobody reads it.

    What a cesspool. Hotmail has always been the ghetto of the internet, but now it's clear that it's infested with criminals, as well as just the technologically illiterate.

    Time to blackhole it.

    --
    "Ladies and gentlemen, my killbot features Lotus Notes and a machine gun. It is the finest available."
  5. Re:it's easy... by David+Gould · · Score: 5, Funny

    I don't think there is any shortage of porn on the net. There is no point in "collecting it all". You know... it took me years to come to that realization. But you're right.
    --
    David Gould
    main(i){putchar(340056100>>(i-1)*5&31|!!(i<6)<< 6)&&main(++i);}
  6. Have they? by ady1 · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Or is it just that making new hotmail accounts is being outsourced to china/india/?