Thursday, January 17, 2008

Yahoo's CAPTCHA Security Reportedly Broken

Thomas Claburn writes on InformationWeek:

Yahoo may soon see a surge in spam coming from Yahoo Mail accounts.

"John Wane," who identifies himself as a Russian security researcher, has posted software that he claims can defeat the CAPTCHA system Yahoo uses to prevent automated registration of free Yahoo Mail accounts.

CAPTCHA stands for Completely Automated Public Turing test to tell Computers and Humans Apart. It's a technique that presents an image depicting distorted text that people, but not machines, can identify.

Large e-mail service providers like Google, Microsoft, and Yahoo present CAPTCHA images to users signing up for new accounts to make sure that there's a real person behind the registration information. These companies do so to discourage spammers from using automated methods to register thousands of free online accounts to send spam.

More here.

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