Security News > 2023 > May > CAPTCHA-Breaking Services with Human Solvers Helping Cybercriminals Defeat Security

"Because cybercriminals are keen on breaking CAPTCHAs accurately, several services that are primarily geared toward this market demand have been created," Trend Micro said in a report published last week.

"These CAPTCHA-solving services don't use techniques or advanced machine learning methods; instead, they break CAPTCHAs by farming out CAPTCHA-breaking tasks to actual human solvers."

CAPTCHA - short for Completely Automated Public Turing test to tell Computers and Humans Apart - is a tool for differentiating real human users from automated users with the goal of combating spam and restricting fake account creation.

The illicit CAPTCHA-solving services work by funneling requests sent by customers and delegating them to their human solvers, who work out the solution and submit the results back to the users.

"CAPTCHAs are common tools used to prevent spam and bot abuse, but the increasing use of CAPTCHA-breaking services has made CAPTCHAs less effective," Costoya said.

To mitigate such risks, online web services are recommended to supplement CAPTCHAs and IP blocklisting with other anti-abuse tools.

News URL

https://thehackernews.com/2023/05/captcha-breaking-services-with-human.html