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How Hackers Listened Their Way Around Google's Recaptcha

Posted by timothy on from the listen-to-what-the-flower-children-scream dept.

An anonymous reader writes with this story at Ars Technica: "Three self-taught hackers from the DC949 hacker collective managed to use a combination of techniques to beat ReCaptcha with 99.1% accuracy (better than most humans!)" In short, the hackers skipped the visual part of the Recaptcha system entirely, focusing on the audio alternative, which gave them a few convenient angles of attack. Google responded with changes to the system, but that doesn't minimize their accomplishment.

1 of 101 comments (clear)

  1. Another solution.. by Ziekheid · · Score: 5, Informative

    Most of the spammers who circumvent captcha's use real people to fill in their captcha's for them. How they do it:
    1) A pay-per-filled-in-captcha site (where members solve captcha's, not really getting paid eventhough they think they will be) OR a high traffic site (false/scam sites, hacked sites, etc)
    2) Mirror the image from the site you want to spam to your own site
    3) A person visits your own site with the mirrored image and solves the captcha
    4) Mirror the answer back to the site you want to spam
    5) ???
    6) Profit! (literally)