CAPTCHA Cracking = More SPAM!

I'm always amazed at business models can be created out of identified business needs. I guess the adage "when the demand curve of people with more money than time intersects with the supply curve of people that have more time than money, a business opportunity exists" is really true.

This specific entry is about CAPTCHAs. These tools are appended at the end of blog comments, bank account login forms, web board submission pages, etc. to ensure that the data being submitted is coming from a human and not a 'bot' programmed to spread SPAM around the interwebs. Many people have put tons of effort into cracking CAPTCHAs so the bots can continue to do their work but a new development in the SPAM arms race is developing: human CAPTCHA crackers.

Dancho Danchev, writing for ZDNet, reports on the emergence of CAPTCHA-breaking as an economic model in India. He reports that it's impossible to untangle the corporate web that's unfurled, given that large CAPTCHA-breaking companies often farm work out to multiple smaller businesses, but all available information suggests that CAPTCHA-cracking (referred to as "solving" in marketing parlance) is a booming sector of the Indian tech economy. Danchev reports that CAPTCHA-crackers can earn more per day than they can as legitimate data processing centers.

Seems like we're destined for more SPAM in the near future... Great just what I was looking forward to.

Here is the full URL of the story: http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20080901-captchas-flummox-bots-but-may-be-doomed-by-captcha-farmers.html