Have Spammers Overcome the CAPTCHA?

thefickler writes "It appears that spammers have found a way to automatically create Hotmail and Yahoo email accounts. They have already generated more than 15,000 bogus Hotmail accounts, according to security company BitDefender. The company says that a new threat, dubbed Trojan.Spammer.HotLan.A, is using automatically generated Yahoo and Hotmail accounts to send out spam email, which suggests that spammers have found a way to overcome Microsoft's and Yahoo's CAPTCHA systems."

Quick!

[QuantumG]

Get the rest of the difficult AI problems into CAPTCHAs. We've finally figured out a way to finance AI research!

Re:it's easy...

[gijoel]

And that porn site will be ripped and put on a torrent within a week. Thus defeating the Captcha farm.

Wow...

[superbus1929]

Judging by the amount of spammers I get on my Invision Power Board forums, which have been through two different styles of CAPTCHA, I'd file this one under the "No Shit" department.

Re:it's easy...

[David Gould]

I don't think there is any shortage of porn on the net. There is no point in "collecting it all".

You know... it took me years to come to that realization. But you're right.

Re:OCR or humans

[dysfunct]

You mean a captcha like this one [thehumorarchives.com]?

Re:Cataloging CAPTCHA info

[Mr2cents]

or make people mail respond to a challenge

You mean... like... a CAPTCHA over e-mail? That seems like a fool-proof plan to me!

Re:Quick!

[WWWWolf]

Get the rest of the difficult AI problems into CAPTCHAs. We've finally figured out a way to finance AI research!

And while the problem remains unsolved, you can use it for distributed problem-solving! Instant sponsoring opportunities from the big industry!

"So you want to sign up for an account? Okay, we need your name, email, and password twice... and could you figure out the optimal shipping route that goes through all of these cities, and only visits each of them once?"

(Turns out to be a route for some annoying door-to-door salesman. Boy, wonder what he feels like when he finds out someone sent a completely misleading solution! At least sanity-check them first =)

Re:FREE PR0N!

[Anonymous Coward]

Then, clearly, the only way to secure hotmail's captchas is to make them so odious that a statistically significant number of bored RIs won't want to solve them. Make all captchas images of latex-clad midgets having group sex while watching Fox News superimposed over stills from German World War II propaganda films.

Re:FREE PR0N!

[Anonymous Coward]

Link please.

Re:OCR or humans

[UrktheTurk]

that's why all of my math captchas are np-complete. no one can post to my forum, and i still get spam, but hey- free solutions to np-complete problems.

Re:Quick!

[Hoi Polloi]

You may now have a Yahoo email account.

Re:Wow the people there are cheap.

[redcane]

When I grow up, I'm going to be the best damn ditch digger I can be!

Re:500 accounts created every hour?

[nasch]

This reminds me of the saying that AI is anything computers can't do well yet, and everything they can already do well is "just programming".