Your CAPTCHAs, They Do Nothing!
CAPTCHAs help to stem the flow of spam on online forms, forums and regristration pages. But hackers are working on ways around them.
CAPTCHA Hacks For Gmail, Blogspot, Craigslist Causing Problems - Search Engine Watch Blog
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Seems the hackers have found a way to work around CAPTCHA - the once great hope of stopping bots from spamming. SEW Forum member,
Sitetruth, notes that there are now programs being offered that work around the filter.
So if you notice a lot of spam coming from Gmail accounts and hacks of Blogspot you will know why. Even the spam fight over at Craigslist is getting to be a major problem according to
TechDirt.
Here's that TechDirt item...
Inside Craigslist's Increasingly Complicated Battle Against Spammers - TechDirt
Quote:
Several commercial products are now available to overcome those little obstacles to bulk posting. A tool called CL Auto Posting Tool is one such product. It not only posts to Craigslist automatically, it has built-in strategies to overcome each Craigslist anti-spam mechanism.
Random text is added to each spam message to fool Craigslist's duplicate message detector. IP proxy sites are used to post from a wide range of IP addresses. E-mail addresses for reply are Gmail accounts conveniently created by Jiffy Gmail Creator ("Who Else Wants to Create Unlimited Gmail Accounts in Seconds Flat Without Breaking a Sweat?") An OCR system reads the obscured text in the CAPTCHA. Automatic monitoring detects when a posting has been flagged as spam and reposts it.
Granted, this seems Craigslist specific, but on our sites, CAPTCHAs seem to be doing a decent job. What's been your experience? Have you noticed more spam sneaking past?