OT how spammers get around the security code

[park_ridge_dave]

Ok, so I was just reading an article at AARP about "captchas" the latest work around for spammers is to pay people in Bangaladesh India etc. to sit at computers and type in the codes to register at forums like ours.

Anyway, it seems that these people get paid like a $1.00 or so USD to type in say 1000 of those codes to register. Like the forum admin people don't have enough to do.

I see occasional "breechs" here that don't seem to last too long, but this is going to get worse before it gets better (IMHO).

I, at first, thought somebody really programmed a new "bot", but now the spammers are "outsourcing" too

Good grief! What next???

Cheers,

Dave

[park_ridge_dave]

Here's a link to an article on ZDnet about this "new" spamming trick.

http://blogs.zdnet.com/security/?p=1835 ... ;post-6304

I think that these scumbags will stop at nothing

Dave

[Amontilado]

Here's a link to an article on ZDnet about this "new" spamming trick.

http://blogs.zdnet.com/security/?p=1835 ... ;post-6304

I think that these scumbags will stop at nothing

Dave

When there is easy money to be made, nope.


Steve

[DreamDiver]

Guess what? They can actually make us ugly Americans pay to input those little codes. How? They set up a site where people have to pay (yes, they actually use their personal credit cards) to look at naughty pictures. But in between each stint of fluff, they make those paying users type in codes... where from? you guessed it - places like forums, yahoo mail and google groups. Paying customers are willing to pay this other unwitting 'toll' to get through to the next bit. They're told it's for security purposes. To make sure they're real people!

So how do I know about it?

There was a video on human potential about this from google labs. It talked about captcha cracking in a computer interface a few years back. Google took the concept and put it on edge: they made a game where two humans who don't even know each other try to guess the same words to describe pictures. The more matches, the better the score. Matching descriptions that meet the right criteria become the words used for google's image search function. Pretty clever, eh? The game still exists, and people still obviously still play it because it still powers google's image search function.

Paying humans to decode captchas directly is the next natural progression, I guess. It's probably cheaper, now that facebook is more popular than porn.