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Spammers Learn To Outsource Their Captcha Needs
Posted by
Zonk
on Sat Nov 25, 2006 05:36 AM
from the hearing-some-ominous-muttering dept.
from the hearing-some-ominous-muttering dept.
lukeknipe writes "Guardian Unlimited reporter Charles Arthur speaks with a spammer, discussing the possibility that his colleagues may be paying people in developing countries to fill in captchas. In his report, Arthur discusses Nicholas Negroponte's gift of hand-powered laptops to developing nations and the wide array of troubles that could arise as the world's exploitable poor go online." From the article: "I've no doubt it will radically alter the life of many in the developing world for the better. I also expect that once a few have got into the hands of people aching to make a dollar, with time on their hands and an internet connection provided one way or another, we'll see a significant rise in captcha-solved spam. But, as my spammer contact pointed out, it's nothing personal. You have to understand: it's just business."
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I call job theft! (Score:4, Funny)
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
*blink* what country do you live in? In a 1st world nation, that's *well* below the standard minimum wage. Here in Ontario, for example, minimum wage is $6.85/hour. Even after taxes are taken off, that's about $45/day if you're working full time, and I think there's talk about raising the minimum wage to $7.40. Hell, an untrained private in the
These lead shoes (Score:3, Informative)
I doubt you would, actually (Score:5, Interesting)
See most people are quite able to speak/cheer about and for beating others up, killing others, war, etc, as long as it's just talking. They might even actually do it, if a fit of rage disables their sanity for long enough. But fits of rage aren't something you can plan and execute whenever you wish. And otherwise when you actually have to do it, there's this interlock against harming other humans. It's partially "what if it was me in his shoes" education (even if you logically know it would never be in his place spamming) and partially that interlock most animals have against harming their own more than strictly necessary. (Even when cats or dogs fight their own there is always a mechanism to signal "I give up" and the other _will_ cease.)
It's a strange world, really. The same people who could be shaking a fist and screaming for war against X at the top of their lungs, would actually have trouble looking one of X in the eyes and squeezing the trigger. A lot of PTSD cases in war aren't just people getting shocked by being shot at, but shocked by having shot other humans.
There is one cathegory that can cheerfully think "it's only business": the sociopaths. They live in a strange world in which the others are NPCs: the others don't matter, they're not the same, "it could be me in his shoes" doesn't apply, etc. They can lie, cheat, murder, torture, whatever, and be perfectly able to look themselves in the mirror after it. Because the other guy didn't matter.
And, sad to say, if you weren't born one, I doubt you could actually beat this guy up in cold blood. If anyone gave you a baseball bat and this guy tied to a chair, you just couldn't actually do it.
And it's probably better that way. I'm thinking we as a society would do better to just start recognizing sociopaths for what they are, and the damage they can do. This guy, for example, is a sociopath, plain and simple. He's not just "being smart", he's not "just doing business", he's not "just doing what's needed", or the other things these guys like to pose as. He's just someone who doesn't even see you as a human being, much less his equal.
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
A long-time problem (Score:3, Insightful)
If I am not mistaken, there have been several stories on this kind of thing on Slashdot...
Ayway, the bottom line is that spammers have been doing this for a long time, and I'm not sure if the $100 laptops will make a difference either way. Will these $100 laptops all have internet access?
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
I would certainly like to see the end of captchas, and I have resisted using them on my own sites. They are really bad for accessibility and therefore illegal in many situations and just generally unfair to anyone who can't solve captchas (whether that be by disability or browser choice). However, I have yet to see any other technology able to do the job.
Re:A long-time problem (Score:4, Interesting)
The CAPTCHA image and question themselves need some thought as well. Just having a person type some "distorted" text verbatim is a bit christian IMHO, because it's vulnerable to OCR. Insisting to change the order or capitalisation ("type this backwards in all lower case") would be a good start, but there are plenty more techniques involving pictures that only a human being will be able to use; and you can possibly even set a knowledge barrier (by using challenges that will be easy for people in your chosen field but not random idiots) to keep out undesirables.
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
Maybe it's just too early in the morning for me, but what does that mean? That typing distorted text is easy? That it's smart/dumb? That it makes you love your neighbor as you would have them love you?
Re:A long-time problem (Score:5, Interesting)
Stuff like "type this backwards in lower case" won't help *in the least* - it'd be trivial to get past, as trivial as writing a bot to collect email addresses, and we know how many of those there are.
Checking the IP address won't work (unfortunately) because certain ISPs (*cough*AOL*cough*) use multiple outgoing IPs for the same user; it's ridiculous but there you have it.
In any case, IP addresses can be forged; the spammer doesn't need to receive a response, he just needs to send his CAPTCHA and spam message; if he's on 4.3.2.1 and needs to send from 1.2.3.4 then he will - the server's "yes you got it" response will be sent to 1.2.3.4 but the spammer doesn't care; his spam has got through.
In short, there is no serverside way of preventing a captcha from being relayed to/from a 'processor' be it OCR or human.
However, what needs to be remembered is that in 95% of cases, any type of captcha will stop 100% of spam. Most captchas out there are pitifully weak in terms of OCR resistance [ocr-research.org.ua], have implementation bugs [puremango.co.uk] coming out of their *ahem* and 'in principle' offer no security whatsoever, but they work because most spammers only after the low hanging fruit.
Parent
using porn to solve captchas (Score:5, Interesting)
This tell us two things (Score:4, Insightful)
2. The Human solution sometimes is the best.
What's going to be interesting is threefold: how do we conquer this problem, and how long until "sweat spam shops" have opened up, and how long until the outsourcers become the main branches? Much like the Cory Doctorow story revolving around sweat shops of MMO players, it might not be long until automated scripts are combined with "sweat shop" style workers, who's only job it so enter in the proper "human" data to fill spam.
On the other hand, as outsourcing has taught us, it is only a matter of time before the outsourcees become the suppliers as they get the training they need. Once the "local guy" starts making up the scripts, it's only a matter of time before he/she goes to open up their own spamming sweat shop. Which is a good thing in a weird way as the article points out - it encourages new business at the expense of annoyance.
The next phase of solutions might have to focus on more detailed question/responses - but there's a danger in this in finding the "sweet spot". You want to make it as expensive as possible for spammers, but not so annoying for your "true customers". Much like my new bank's online service, perhaps, where they made me select my "security image" and more personal questions so I had to enter 2-3 things to truly "log in" the first time.
it is just business (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:it is just business (Score:4, Insightful)
This is of course because spreading spam costs too little to be worried about pre-selecting the audience. When advertising on TV or sending info by post, companies usually try to match their audience to the product they are going to sell. I.e. they do not send adverts for luxury products to houses in poor neighborhoods, they try to weed their lists so that bouncing addresses are not kept on it forever, etc.
All this to maximize the return on the cost of sending the adverts.
Spammers don't have to do this, because they make money anyway.
When it would cost 1 cent to send a spam message, it would not be worthwile to send it to 100000 addresses and make 1 sale of a $25 product.
Parent
Re:it is just business (Score:4, Funny)
Parent
or maybe... (Score:4, Insightful)
In fact, there is a lot of good, low-end on-line work low-skilled third-world labor can do once they are on-line. That's a good development: it gets work done that otherwise wouldn't get done, and it gets people jobs that beat the back-breaking, dangerous work they'd otherwise have to do (provided they aren't too old, weak or ill to do it in the first place).
Hey, maybe that third world labor can also do the spam classification, manually. I'd be willing to pay for that.
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
1) We boycot them, so the criminals who exploit them don't get any money
2) Keep using them, so the criminals who spam us don't get any money
This is simply stupid (Score:5, Insightful)
Not everyone in the third world is going to get computers
Every computer is not going to get internet connected
Not everyone on the internet is going to be spamming
Also consider the fact how much can a single person spam. If the dude with the new cheap computer answers captchas for even 15 hours a day they would hardly generate over a 1000 spam messages which is likely to get the spammer one or two hits. Do you think the spammer is stupid enough to pay for this much profit?
I hope the spammer understands... (Score:3, Interesting)
Spam will never be stopped as long as the perceived gains > perceived risks. Unless there is a holocaust of stupid people, there will always be people dumb enough to buy from spam, so you're not going to solve this equation by reducing the left side. So raise the right side... Put $10 million into ten Swiss bank accounts. Then get the message out: First ten times a known major spammer is brutally murdered, the first party to provide evidence of their involvement gets the location of a buried bank account key.
I don't usually believe in violence to solve problems, but when you're dealing with people who've demonstrated that there is nothing so depraved they won't do it, and the alternative is governments regulating the 'Net... *shudder*...
Now, speaking seriously (okay, more seriously - hearing that Alan Ralsky got brutally tortured to death on the evening news would KICK ASS), as long as everyone with a brain is absolutely determined to not respond to any spam the problem will never be solved. Why? Because as long as that is true, the S-N ratio at the spammer's inbox will be favorable, because you can never block 100% of spam, and unless you DO, idiots will get it and will click it.
So, e-mail clients should be programmed to automatically respond to EVERY message they get (or at the very least, every message flagged as spam) with an ad-libbed "O rly? tell me more", unless the e-mail came from a known-good mailing list or contact. Result: If even 1% of recipients responded and didn't buy, the signal-to-noise ratio at the bastard's inbox plunges by a factor of a hundred. Everybody responds, and spam-friendly ISPs implode under a digital tsunami of replies. The SOB pumping out 100 million messages can't possibly sort out the 1000 buyers from the 99,999,000 fakes.
And for spammers who use links to their websites: Users submit suspect sites to open database of spammer sites. Sites are voted on; After 100 votes, if the guilty verdict > 90% the site it put in the "to DDOS" list for a client script to retrieve and wget entries from. Certain disreputable hackers, whom the database operators want nothing to do with, unfortunately rent botnets and install this client program on millions of hacked windows boxes. Would that be an immoral action? Yes. Spammers have all the moral restraint of Nazis, and they're winning the spam war - playing nice is no longer an option.
Unfortunately, it won't happen. MS, Google, Yahoo, and Firebird need to incorporate this into all their clients, along with whitelisting utilities, all at once - NGH. Because of the sheep mentality, no one will want to be the first to stand up. In short, like the decay of diamond into graphite, it's *should* happen but has far too high of an energy barrier to actually happen.
Okay, I'm ready - someone ^C^V that stupid checklist.
Follow the money (Score:4, Insightful)
Parent
Just business? (Score:5, Funny)
I'm currently hiring 3rd world citizens to kick spammers in the crotch.
To the spammers: it's nothing personal. You have to understand: it's just business.
Yaz.
This is just stupid (Score:4, Interesting)
Come on!, Remember the usual "Don't teach the poor to read, that would make them a threat"? This all sounds as "don't give the poor any access to the internet, they could become a threat" . And for god's sake it is not like captchas are any difficult for just a program to beat.
I administrate a site with a vBulletin forum, and every once in a while a bot posts messages. Registration requires passing a captcha, in fact, I decided to just remove the captcha, it was seriously not helping stop the spam and was just making the registration harder FOR HUMANS.
BTW: I noticed that Russian bots are more likely to beat captchas.
Re:This is just stupid (Score:4, Informative)
Parent
Re:Now what? (Score:4, Insightful)
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
I think this one is a little different, the other article was just a hypothetical, this is actually a real case of spamming occuring with a captcha image.
I also found his quotation from Bill Gates quite interesting...
Oh well. I guess I'll have to sit in the corner with Bill Gates, who declared in January 2004 that "spam will be solved in two years". After you with the pointy-D hat, Bill.
Perhaps Bill was thinking about his trusted/treacherous [slashdot.org] computing model (posted earlier today on slashdot) when he