CAPTCHA cannot prevent SPAM
This is a video demo on the Botmaster software that automatically posts your messages to forums, guestbooks, bulletin boards and link directories. It claims to be able to bypass every possible type of protection from automatic registration, including CAPTCHA.
For the non-techie, CAPTCHA stands for “Completely Automated Public Turing test to tell Computers and Humans Apart”, where a script tries to detect if the current visitor to a particular page is a bot (robot) or real human.
This is the common “type in the characters you see in the box below” text field that you find in almost any form, where the characters are distorted to make it harder for bots to decipher it.
Anyway, the video demo shows how easy it is for this program to bypass those. I think 1 or 2 years from now, every spammer will be able to bypass them.
So what should you learn from this?
For website developers, just because you have CAPTCHA enabled, don’t think you’re safe from bots.
February 5th, 2007 at 3:05 pm
can it bypass your blog comment spam protection?
February 5th, 2007 at 4:09 pm
2nd question: so how do we prevent spambots invading our forums?
February 5th, 2007 at 4:33 pm
Ans 1 : emm not so sure if this plugin is one of it that it can crack but i still do get spam - though not as bad as last time (im talking about 10-20 spam. last time 100-200).
Ans 2 : 1 way is to manually approve each member. another is to ban certain email address (based on my sports forum, spammers like to use *@*.info email addresses.
February 6th, 2007 at 10:35 am
thanks for the info. will check it out.