Researcher Cracks Yahoo's CAPTCHA Software

Filed in archive Spam News on January 19, 2008

An anonymous programmer going by the name "John Wane" has claimed to have cracked Yahoo's CAPTCHA software. CAPTCHA (Completely Automated Public Turing Test to Tell Computers and Humans Apart) software is used by most major websites to prevent automated systems from creating thousands of accounts to send spam with. "John Wane" posted code for a decoder he claimed had an accuracy rate of 35%.

"It's not necessary to achieve a high degree of accuracy when designing automated recognition software," he wrote. "An accuracy of 15 percent is enough when attacker is able to run 100,000 tries per day."
Yahoo says it is aware of the issue and is working on improving their CAPTCHA system.

Last year a virtual stripper named Melissa helped spammers get around CAPTCHA codes. Every time the user correctly entered the characters in the accompany CAPTCHA window, she would shed more and more of her clothes.