Yahoo CAPTCHA Hacked

According to a recent article on TMCNet, the CAPTCHA test that is used by some of the largest email providers has been compromised. This could, if true, lead to a massive increase in spam in coming days.

CAPTCHA has long been picked away at, the simplest CAPTCHA tests being compromised years ago by OCR software reading the image. This lead to further distorted images some leading to images that were harder for legitimate users to read as well. This is the problem that brought me to look for other solutions to stop automated form submissions, which has actually been quite successful.

My current contracting company is having some serious spamming issues on their open community projects, and have found different ways of dealing with it without using CAPTCHA, and are having limited success. I am hoping to talk to the lead developer of that project and sharing some of my findings with the team before moving on to my next contract.

CAPTCHA is running on a limited shelf life, anyone using it would be wise to start investigating new methods of dealing with auto-submissions. The methods I discussed weeks ago, have been proven very successful, and I suggest everybody at least try them.