Security News > 2022 > January > Researchers develop CAPTCHA solver to aid dark web research
A team of researchers at the Universities of Arizona, Georgia, and South Florida, have developed a machine-learning-based CAPTCHA solver that they claim can overcome 94.4% of real challenges on dark websites.
The collection of cyber-threat intelligence from illicit dark web markets and forums becomes challenging and expensive, as employees have to be involved in the CAPTCHA solving step.
The size of the CAPTCHA challenge doesn't affect the effectiveness of the solver much, especially when measuring accumulative performance for three attempts.
Of course, this testing data concerns a particular dark web market, but a similar performance level is expected on any site that employs word CAPTCHAs, according to the researchers.
Intelligence and highly-capable CAPTCHA solvers like this one can potentially disrupt the space, at least on the dark web where less sophisticated challenges are used.
The authors have published the final version of their solver on GitHub, but not the training data set of 50,000 CAPTCHA images.
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