Bot Busts Newest Hotmail Captcha


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Bot busts newest Hotmail CAPTCHA

Spammers' tool takes longer but gets around Microsoft defenses 20% of the time

by Gregg Keizer

February 18, 2009 (Computerworld)

Spammers have cracked latest defense against abuse of its Live e-mail service using a sophisticated network of hacked computers that receive encrypted instructions from a central server, a security company has reported. The botnet, or collection of compromised PCs, can decipher Live Hotmail's CAPTCHA (Completely Automated Public Turing Test to Tell Computers and Humans Apart) registration safeguard in about 20 seconds, said Websense Inc. researcher Sumeet Prasad.

CAPTCHA is the term for the distorted characters that many Web sites, such as e-mail services and blogs, use to prevent spammers and cybercriminals from creating massive numbers of new accounts. Those accounts are used to send junk mail or messages that try to dupe people into visiting malicious sites, and are valuable because spam filters rarely block the "hotmail.com" domain address.

Story: http://www.computerworld.com/action/articl...p;intsrc=kc_top

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