If you’ve got a Hotmail, Yahoo or Google account you’ll probably of come across “captchas” before — the pictures of distorted text that you have to decipher and type into a box when you create an account. This is a device to prove you’re human rather than a program signing up for an account from which they can spam the world.
“Captcha” is a weird word. It’s an acronym for Completely Automated Public Turing Test to Tell Computers and Humans Apart and by and large, captchas have worked pretty well for several years.
A few months ago it came to light that hackers had built captcha-cracking programmes that analyzed the text and took a shot at what the characters were. These were good enough to threaten some captcha-protected systems.
Now things have taken a turn for the worse, Captcha-cracking has become an industry!
The forces of evil have set up captcha-cracking factories in low-income economies in the Far East. Picture rooms full of people, busily cracking the captchas and being paid for each one they crack. The payments are small, but at a fast workrate, they add up to more than a living wage in a low-income economy and the work probably compares pretty well to dealing with tech-support queries!
This new menace makes it all the more vital to remember the #1 rule for dealing with spam:
NEVER, EVER ASK TO UNSUBSCRIBE FROM SPAM.
If you reply to a spam, even to ask to unsubscribe, it tells the spammer your e-mail address is “live”.
That means the spammer can sell it to other spammers for more money and …
you’ll get a ton more spam.
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