Spam Reports

Spammers Need Human Workforce to Solve CAPTCHAs

An entire system was born

By Bogdan Popa, Security and Search Engines Editor

10th of April 2008, 21:06 GMT

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Since email spamming means sending messages to millions of users at a time, spammers need lots of email accounts in order to reach this goal. Because creating email

accounts manually would be like swimming from UK to the US, they have created special bots supposed to register new usernames automatically. However, companies around the world have always struggled to block this attempt and implemented more and more powerful CAPTCHAs which made their attempts look like slow boats to China.

Anyway, it seems that spammers have found a way to avoid the CAPTCHAs: human workforce who would manually enter the security verification words and help with the creation of new accounts. According to PC Pro, which cited TrendLands, spammers are willing to pay approximately 2 or 3 pounds a day for such an employee who would assure that a CAPTCHA is 100 percent correct.

"The cybercrime industry is no longer the reserve of individuals, but that of organised gangs with large amounts of cash available to them. By employing people to solve the CAPTCHA problem, for as little as �2 or �3 a day, cyber criminals have access to millions of registered accounts. These accounts are then used to send millions of spam messages with the aim of infecting users with a variety of malware, such as a keylogger that intends to solicit personal information such as banking information or passwords," Rik Ferguson of Trend Micro said according to PC Pro.

What's interesting is that CAPTCHAs seem to be a real problem for spammers as they have had several attempts to bypass this type of security measure. For instance, they have designed special software applications which require users to enter a visual CAPTCHA supposed to be needed later when creating new spamming accounts to send unsolicited email messages.

TAGS:

security | captcha | spammer | email

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