deCAPTCHA May Help Spammers To Create Fake Accounts

Computer geeks at the Stanford University have now come up with an algorithm that can automatically breach the security of the websites like Yahoo, Microsoft’s Hotmail, Facebook, Twitter, etc. This team of computer scientists that are specialized in artificial intelligence, audio processing, and computer security have found a few security loopholes in these systems. To prevent spammers and viruses from gaining access to the web pages, many websites ask the users to enter correctly a string of distorted alphanumeric codes given in the dialog box. This puzzle is called CAPTCHA and it’s used to confirm that the user is a human being. Although the puzzle is a cakewalk for humans, it’s very difficult for computers. The CAPTCHA is also available in audio form for the visually handicapped internet users. The Stanford university researchers have found that this audio version of CAPTCHA is quite vulnerable and their algorithm can solve it. They had done this previously in 2008 but have now developed a new algorithm for more secure versions.

#-Link-Snipped-#This can be a blessing for the spammers as it will help spammers to load the websites with spam. Currently, the spammers have to pay human employees for this work but with this advance, the cost will fall below 1 cent per spam. Team leader Elie Bursztein told that their new algorithm called “deCAPTCHA” was able to defeat the security systems of Microsoft and Yahoo with more than 50 % success rate. Soon after that, Microsoft has moved on to a better version of CAPTCHA. But the algorithm solved the puzzle in 1.5 percent cases.

An audio CAPTCHA reads out a string of numbers and alphabets but with some amount of audio distortion. However, the visually impaired people have exceptionally sharp hearing sense, so they can easily understand the characters and enter them. The Stanford team formulated a learning program to that processed the sound in a way similar to the human ear. The group is now working on several new forms of audio CAPTCHA. One of them adds music to the spoken string which makes it difficult for the computer code to understand the actual string. The other one combines two voices reading out two different strings at the same instant. We humans can easily pick up one person’s dialogue by neglecting the other voices in the surroundings but for the machines, it’s not so easy a task.

With this algorithm, the security experts have started thinking about newer ways that could hike up the web security. Let’s hope that they come up with a secure enough version of CAPTCHA before the spammers flood the websites with useless spam.