Inside India's CAPTCHA Solving Economy

Anti-Globalism points out an analysis of India's CAPTCHA-solving industry posted at ZDNet. It begins: "No CAPTCHA can survive a human that's receiving financial incentives for solving it, and with an army of low-waged human CAPTCHA solvers officially in the business of data processing while earning a mere $2 for solving a thousand CAPTCHAs, I'm already starting to see evidence of consolidation between India's major CAPTCHA solving companies. The consolidation, logically leading to increased bargaining power, is resulting in an international franchising model recruiting data processing workers empowered with do-it-yourself CAPTCHA syndication web based kits, API keys, and thousands of proxies to make their work easier and the process more efficient."

Comments

Interesting.

[jcuervo]

The going rate is $1k. For a simple /usr/share/dict/words attack on some random account on some random site, it'd cost you about $100.

Re:antispam wetware

[maxume]

There are plenty of anti-spam systems that aggregate 'This is spam' clicks from their users (I'm pretty sure that Google and Yahoo! do, I think there are systems that are more explicit about it).

The only payout is in supposedly lower spam->inbox rates though.

Re:Proof that

[Hurricane78]

Unfortunately you can also bet that China (as all other governments) are going to use it to select "acceptable" viewpoints only.

There, fixed that for ya.