Hacker News Reader

Comment by il | Hacker News Reader

You know, most modern capchas are not solved by bots, but by people in third world countries solving them for pennies. The current going rate is about $1/1000 and there are easy to use captcha solving APIs for any platform. capcha has long provided an illusion of security, nothing more. Any and all captchas will be broken.

View on HN

Before adding captchas to my stupid personal blog, Akismet was catching ~300 attempted spams a day, and I was manually flagging ~2 a day.

Then I installed reCaptcha, and now Akismet catches ~10 a month, and I've had to manually flag zero.

I'll take that illusion, thanks.

That's one datapoint. The counterpoint is the thousands of forum owners who mistakenly relied on captcha to prevent spam at the expense of other antispam measures, like GeoIP.

I'm not saying captchas are a magic one-step solution to end all spam (hence the mention of Akismet). I'm just disputing the idea that they are "nothing more" than illusory security. Sure, they can be turked, and sure, if someone relies only on captchas they'll probably eventually get screwed. But they do provide some benefit as part of a complete approach against spam, in that they raise the cost of a spam attempt up from zero. Unless you have meaningful levels of traffic, the vast majority of spammers aren't going to bother with you if it costs anything at all to hit you.

ok, but how many comments are you losing because people don't want to fill out a captcha?

i've used defensio.com for filtering comments on my site with no captcha and rarely ever get a false positive or negative. false negatives are easy to spot, and users can manually override false positives by supplying an email address to get a confirmation link (which gets fed back to defensio as a false positive once clicked).

It's a tradeoff, sure. In my case, I'm perfectly happy to trade a few comments from people who don't want to deal with a captcha for never having to manually deal with spam. YMMV.

There are better ways of reducing comment spam to near zero without resorting to captchas. Here's how I did it:

https://secure.grepular.com/Blocking_Comment_Spam_Using_ModS...

It's still working now.

That's great, pretty much any home-rolled CAPTCHA will perform great, simply because it's not worthwhile for spammers to design an attack. If that, however, was the default anti-spam mechanism on, say, wordpress installs, it'd be automated against in minutes.

Definitely. If more people rolled their own, the spammers would be screwed.

I know the founders of reCaptcha. This is easier to prevent than you think. Its also quite rare.

Heh, I know people who are working on breaking reCaptcha. Maybe they should get together and learn from each other.

If you're saying that it's possible to prevent manual, outsourced captcha solving, I would have to strongly disagree. It's similar to the futility of DRM as an antipiracy measure. As long as I can see the captcha, I can pay someone in another country to solve it for me.

I will agree that it's rare- but the most sophisticated and high-volume spammers do it, and they're the ones you have to worry about.

In case people start giving me sideways glances I want to make it clear that I haven't done any blackhat stuff in a very long time, but I'm still interested in the blackhat community from a security researcher's perspective.

I'm not saying that its possible to do it in an automated way. I'm just saying that tools exist to create red flags that would make thing easily verified by a human. They have ways in which they deal with these things. All I'm saying is so far, its been working for them.

You're probably not going to tell me more about these tools, although I would be very curious to learn how they work.

All I have is anecdotal evidence- I know several people who are making their living spamming Craigslist and outsourcing their ReCaptcha solving. Since they can make $XX per post, paying pennies for captcha is a tiny expense. I don't condone this behavior, but be aware- it happens more than you think.

Anyway, probably best to take the discussion to email if you want more...perspective from the other side.

£1/1000 is still more expensive then if they could be done with human input. And they need to be done for every time a captcha is needed, with this scheme you could presumably pay for humans to solve the adds currently in rotation (ten? hundreds? thousands? not more than that) then just remember the results.

I don't think having people solve capchas for money is all that common. Do you have a source or something? Even if it is common, capchas still stop those spamming strategies that rely on each spam being free for the spammer.

I don't know how prevalent this practice is exactly, but I have it on good authority that sites like decaptcher.com are making a mint selling this service.

yeh but you gota look at it from a business standpoint who profits from the outsourcing? why would a website owner pay to outsource the ads to get solved in india just to get blacklisted then lose revenue that would have come in anyway for less

Reply on news.ycombinator.com