Slashdot Mirror
Fallout From the Fall of CAPTCHAs
An anonymous reader recommends Computerworld's look at the rise and fall of CAPTCHAs, and at some of the ways bad guys are leveraging broken CAPTCHAs to ply their evil trade. "CAPTCHA used to be an easy and useful way for Web administrators to authenticate users. Now it's an easy and useful way for malware authors and spammers to do their dirty work. By January 2008, Yahoo Mail's CAPTCHA had been cracked. Gmail was ripped open soon thereafter. Hotmail's top got popped in April. And then things got bad. There are now programs available online (no, we will not tell you where) that automate CAPTCHA attacks. You don't need to have any cracking skills. All you need is a desire to spread spam, make anonymous online attacks against your enemies, propagate malware or, in general, be an online jerk. And it's not just free e-mail sites that can be made to suffer..."
CAPTCHAs are only able to protect things worth $.0025, no matter how good they are. Simply because at about that price, you can pay humans to solve them for you.
Thus for preventing mail spam, it can work. But to prevent, say, bots from harvesting Ticketmaster, they will always fail, no matter how good they are.
Test your net with Netalyzr
I hate the fact that a computer can view these things better than I can. Lately, a lot of the CAPTCHAs have become unreadable by human viewers.
They don't view it better than you, they just do not get impatient from failing 4 out of 5 times.
CAPTCHA is still useful for small to medium sites that aren't specifically targeted. Your average blog, for example, is only hit by random bots that try to get quick and easy posts. Only the largest sites like GMail need to find something better today.
For example, I use reCAPTCHA on DocForge to block the standard wiki spam bots. Since my site's not large enough to be under heavy attack very little gets through. Someday CAPTCHA may be so easy to break that everyone's at risk, but not today.
Developers: We can use your help.
Computers are pretty good at math last time I checked. Asking for something that would require a full on AI to answer is good (the hair color part), but the problem is that it requires a human to seed the questions, which means they will be limited in number. If they're limited in number then the spammers will just go through and keep reloading the screen until they've seen all (or mostly all) of the answers and program their bot with the correct answers.
CAPTCHAs need to be able to be generated algorithmically by a computer, but not answered by one, which is a surprisingly difficult problem. Anything that requires human intervention on the creation of each variation is doomed to fail because spammers have more free time than you do.
I read the internet for the articles.
The problem is that to set up that CAPTCHA you have to have a person sift through a huge picture archive of cats and dogs and mark each one. However, that limits the size of your CAPTCHA dictionary to however many entries a person can parse in a reasonable amount of time. This means the bad guys can sit down a person (or two, or ten) and go through all of your images to seed a database with the correct answers for their bots.
I read the internet for the articles.
not really, unless the catalog is huge and you expect your legitimate users to be biologists. if there are even as many as 100 animals the script can just guess, and 1% of attempts get through. when thousands of bots are signing up simultaniously 1% is a whole lot of bots
Snowden and Manning are heroes.
it is no wonder that the "under 25" crowd now says "myspace me" or "facebook me" and no longer use email. why would they?
in a globally connected world with several billion possible users - open email simply won't work much longer.
when we need are permission based systems - ones in which people need permission before they can contact another person. it would eliminate spam entirely, by integrating whitelists into mail clients. because no one has built a system like this that leverages and extends existing email servers - private organizations leveraging social connections have moved in to fill the gap. sadly, because facebook messages and myspace messages are not built on an open standard - you have to go through those companies to contact people.
BONGARD PROBLEMS. No machine can crack them in at least 10 years time. And when one does, baby, we'll have genuine AI.
On gMail some simple rules should suffice. Don't allow a brand-new account to send out more than a few (20?) emails a day. Make sure that most of the email varies. Make sure the account gets and reads email as well as sends it, and that the email is accessed.
The trick is, you keep rotating these measures and don't tell anyone just what they are. You don't automatically disable anyone who breaks the rules, you just hold on to any large number of similar messages until a human reviews them--possibly through some mechanism similar to the "picture matching game" where multiple people identify a message as spam.
If it's determined to be spam, never tell them you caught on, just stop email from that account from being sent, silently. Log the ip addresses and use them to help you identify other accounts from the same computer if possible.
You could also use the ip addresses to notify people that they are a spambot next time that IP address is used to look up something on any google service.
Wow, that's a broad action with a lot of chances for failure, but I bet it could be refined enough to work--and worst case failure isn't bad at all--just one time when you go to search google you get a warning page back instead of your search results.
Really this just takes some dedicated effort and creative thinking by a strong, creative engineer with some power within google (I know there are quite a few of those)
This is misleadingly implies that CAPTCHA somehow enables spammers. On the contrary, broken CAPTCHA does not enable spammers to do anything they couldn't already do -- we're just back where we were before CAPTCHA.
And to be fair, CAPTCHA is still reducing the rate at which attackers are able to create accounts, keeping some smaller, less sophisticated players out of the game entirely, and protecting lower-value targets (e.g., most small-time bloggers with comment spam problems still see a drastic improvement when they set up CAPTCHA)
If everyone stopped using CAPTCHA, the spam problem would get noticeably worse.