Although spammers are some of the most detested and despised members of the Internet community, one thing can be said for them. They are an industrious bunch. According to an article from the NY Times spammers are now paying individuals to solve captcha security fields.
Many of you have encountered captchas before. They are the fields that require users to type a line of semi-obscure text to prove that they are human, rather than a spam-generated robot. Some creative spammers are reportedly paying individuals in India, Bangladesh, and China to fill in the captchas for them.
The rate ranges between 80 cents to $1.20 for each 1,000 cracked captchas. Although the pay may seem pitiful to you and I, it is quite attractive to individuals in some developing countries where 50 cents an hour is considered decent.
Executives at Google have weighed in on the issue and said that they are not concerned with spammers paying individuals to bypass captchas, because it is only one of many ways a site protects itself. Macduff Hughes, an engineering director at Google stated “it can’t be helped that paid human solvers will be able to solve captchas, our goal is to make mass account creation less attractive to spammers, and the fact that spammers have to pay people to solve captchas proves that the tool is working.”
No related posts.
