Image Captcha Cracking

Using CAPTCHAS is a common way to help stop automated Web form submission. However, they're routinely cracked so perhaps there's a better way?

Here's a case in point: Xrumer is a tool commonly used to automate registration a countless numbers of forums, and with the latest version (5.0A) people can also automate registration on sites like Hotmail and Google. Bigshot companies like Google and Microsoft can afford to throw a lot of money at captcha development to make images that are difficult to read with automated software. Nevertheless the latest version of Xrumer reportedly cracks some of the most difficult CAPTCHAs.

Any Internet spammer (who are incidentally akin to spray paint taggers that destroy public property) can buy a copy of Xrumer for about $520 (at botmaster.net) and set it loose registering new accounts and spamming the Internet. Others use Xrumer as a tool against their competition. For example, by spamming the right places with the right kinds of text and links a person can knock their competition out of Google's ranking.

What I'm wondering is why anyone even bothers using image CAPTCHAs anymore? Seems to me that what would be far more difficult to crack are questions and answers. In place of the CAPTCHA you pose a question with a known answer. For example, a simple math problem, environmental questions (what color is the sky on an overcast day?), silly questions (does a dog bark or meow?) or similar.

I gave up on CAPTCHAs quite some time ago and opted for the question method instead. So far, so good.

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I agree completely, Some CAPTCHA's are extremely difficult to read.

USDoD14 October 14, 2008 (Article Rating:

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And yet WinITPro is still using CAPTCHAs ;)

I think they can still prove useful, but I feel that if you're going to bother using them you should at least do something productive as well ... like transcribe books.
http://recaptcha.net/

I've seen the question/answer method on a few sites and I think I like it better. The questions tend to be fairly simple but probably more difficult for a spambot to deal with (at least at the present time).

No anti-bot technology is immune from hacking, however. As a matter of fact you might say they are all equally vulnerable where a distributed workforce is used.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Captcha#Human_solvers

bsweeney October 15, 2008 (Article Rating:

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CAPTCHAs are starting to become so obfuscated as to prove difficult for legitimate registrants. Time to move to the questions, but of course if everyone does move to question-based validation, then the spammers will simply create an app to evaluate the question and provide the simple answer.

ejhonda October 16, 2008 (Article Rating:

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