Yahoo CAPTCHA Hacked

Hell Yeah! reminds us of a 2-week-old development that somehow escaped notice here. A team of Russian hackers has found a way to decipher a Yahoo CAPTCHA, thought to be one of the most difficult, with 35% accuracy. The Russian group's notice, posted by one "John Wane," is dated January 16. This site hosts a rapidshare link to what looks to be demonstration software for Windows, and quotes the Russian researchers: "It's not necessary to achieve high degree of accuracy when designing automated recognition software. The accuracy of 15% is enough when attacker is able to run 100,000 tries per day, taking into the consideration the price of not automated recognition — one cent per one CAPTCHA."

Comments

I thought those things were already broken

[Anonymous Coward]

by having a teenage boy do it in exchange for letting him see porn.

Re:I thought those things were already broken

[Anonymous Coward]

Not an easy job to stay concentrated on.

Re:I thought those things were already broken

[Anonymous Coward]

I don't know exactly how large porn images are, never having looked at them.

Posting on /. and you've never seen porn? Bullshit.

Re:I thought those things were already broken

[nb caffeine]

Maybe he only watches movies

Hey

[Misanthrope]

They're used to seeing Cyrillic, the captcha has got to be easier to read!

Re:Gentlemen, start your spambots

[SoupGuru]

That reminds me of the age check for Leisure Suit Larry back in the day... Who knew that the desire of a horny teen to see pixellated boobs would lead to history research?

Re:Malware

[wellingtonsteve]

without a chord is fine... ...it's when you're missing a cord that you need to worry

Re:Malware

[bcdm]

Hey now, be fair...what's the point of bungee jumping if you can't have "Thunderstruck" or similar playing on the way down?

Jumping without a chord would be no fun at all.

Re:Gentlemen, start your spambots

[General Wesc]

What about introducing spelling and grammatical errors? This would be difficult for a computer to interpret, but doable for a human.

Yeah, that would solve the problem until someone developed an automated program to check spelling and grammar, which I'm sure is near-imposible. (By the way, does anyone know why there's a red line under that last word? Is my screen screwed up?)

Re:Gentlemen, start your spambots

[TubeSteak]

What about introducing spelling and grammatical errors? This would be difficult for a computer to interpret, but doable for a human. LoL! I find ur 1d3as fascntng, & wood lik 2 sbscrbe 2 YR noozl3ter.
kthxby

Re:Gentlemen, start your spambots

[Artefacto]

That's still not as good as this solution. I can't understand why it's not widely adopted.

Re: Imposible red lining.

[bornwaysouth]

Red lining ( a motoring term) comes from tiping too fast, typing to fist, typing two farst, um, using more than one finger per hand.

The key is to never type faster than your brains alpha rhythm. Otherwise, you slide into a meditative zone known as 'T-pool bimbo limbo'. On the other hand, I've generally found typists to be saner than managers, so maybe the mediative zone is a defense mechanism. The frontal cortex contemplates what's for dinner tonight while some low reptilian region recognizes scrawled letters and types them.

Which leads back to the main topic.
What is the lowest animal life that could be trained to log into Yahoo?

Re:Gentlemen, start your spambots

[aliquis]

Just put some hard to read perl code in there and ask the user to say what it does. If the answer is correct it's a bot, if the answer is wrong it's probably a human ;)