Spambot cracks Hotmail’s, Gmail’s CAPTCHA
I haven’t made a post in a while, I’ve been working on the new site (:D) but forgot to post. 
http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20080415-gone-in-60-seconds-spambot-cracks-livehotmail-captcha.html
Are we typing those 6-9 letters and symbols that half the time you can’t read for nothing?
At the moment, it appears so. Yahoo, Hotmail, Gmail, and what’s next - US Government Security details? Ok, so I may be going overboard, but this is crazy. After 17 years of spam, everybody has a filter, a spam box, and never reads the emails. Still these nutcases make a bot to crack the Image Verification, then send a million messages to us. Recently, I changed regular emails, got a new “fake” one, and yet I get spam. I’m sick of it! Well, enough of my rant, I’ll give you some of the article:
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Internet users are quite familiar with the Completely Automated Public Turing test to tell Computers and Humans Apart (CAPTCHA), a quick method that verifies whether or not the user trying to sign up is a person or a bot. A picture with swirled, mangled, or otherwise distorted characters is displayed and the user then types in the correct letters or numbers.
Back in early February, a group cracked Windows Live Hotmail’s CAPTCHA. A few weeks later, Gmail’s version followed suit. In just over a month’s time, some anti-spam vendors were forced to completely block the domain for the popular service as bots signed up for thousands of bogus accounts and began to flood the tubes with e-mail advertisements for lottery tickets and watches. The close proximity of the two cracks has done everything but sealed CAPTCHA’s fate.
In one day, the bot can amass at least 1,440 accounts. And that’s just one bot. This same bot can then send spam to multiple e-mail addresses (using both CC and BCC lists) continuously, switching between accounts (both in the from: and to: fields) in order to lower the chance of being spotted.
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I thought about using CAPTCHA, but I guess I’ll go sit under a rock and start thinking.
Until next time,
cms07