Inside India's CAPTCHA Solving Economy

Anti-Globalism points out an analysis of India's CAPTCHA-solving industry posted at ZDNet. It begins: "No CAPTCHA can survive a human that's receiving financial incentives for solving it, and with an army of low-waged human CAPTCHA solvers officially in the business of data processing while earning a mere $2 for solving a thousand CAPTCHAs, I'm already starting to see evidence of consolidation between India's major CAPTCHA solving companies. The consolidation, logically leading to increased bargaining power, is resulting in an international franchising model recruiting data processing workers empowered with do-it-yourself CAPTCHA syndication web based kits, API keys, and thousands of proxies to make their work easier and the process more efficient."

Interesting.

[jcuervo]

The going rate is $1k. For a simple /usr/share/dict/words attack on some random account on some random site, it'd cost you about $100.

Re:antispam wetware

[maxume]

There are plenty of anti-spam systems that aggregate 'This is spam' clicks from their users (I'm pretty sure that Google and Yahoo! do, I think there are systems that are more explicit about it).

The only payout is in supposedly lower spam->inbox rates though.

Re:Proof that

[Hurricane78]

Unfortunately you can also bet that China (as all other governments) are going to use it to select "acceptable" viewpoints only.

There, fixed that for ya.

Re:Best way to combat spam is to combat botnets

[Anonymous Coward]

Users need education too,

If you have an infected computer , your routers outgoing traffic is likely to grow huge over time.
Why not Enable the routers outgoing logging?
This may be used to let you know the computer may be infected . Normal outgoing traffic will be things like automatic updates to anti virus , OS update checks and RSS feeds.and of course email requests and web page visits
    Let the machine idle for say several hours . Do not use it . If you have hundreds of K or many megabytes of outgoing data in your routers outgoing log, you may be infected or you need to to determine what is sending this traffic if legitimate.
  The point being .. People need to know what their computers are doing and too many don't know or care .
People want to treat a computer as an appliance
and it's too complicated to ever be just that .