Have an input element that can't be seen. If it has something in it, ignore the submit. Works for all my sites so far.
The company I work for makes a SaSS forum product, and while we do have multiple spam prevention methods (akismet, stopforumspam, honeypot, a hidden input), there’s enough stuff out there that has targeted our platform that a Recaptcha on the registration form is needed.
We haven’t need it on any other forms yet though. After registration it’s all handled by the other methods and various moderation tools.
I can and have defeated forms that tried to do all of those things very easily in the past.
Keep in mind that if you randomize across a few variations (i.e. 4-5 page layouts), that's easily discerned if you pull the page source down 20-30 times, doa complex diff, scrub out obviously random strings, and check the total unique variations you're seeing.
That may seem like a lot of work, but consider that if you don't do it all at once, but instead roll out small change after small change, the person or people using it are not weighing to cost to do everything required to bypass it compared to finding another open mail form, but the cost to bypass just the new fix you put in place. Also, they might think it's fun doing so...
And on the site dev's side, they can just choose to outsource it to a CAPTCHA (not that there aren't services to easily bypass CAPTCHAs at scale at sub-cent per CAPTCHA rates, see https://anti-captcha.com/).
Note: To forestall any assumptions, I wasn't doing any spamming or helping spamming in any way.
It's a "don't have to outrun the bear" situation, make yourself just difficult enough that some easier target gets snagged instead.
If everyone else is incorporating recaptcha, they're all running faster than you. Even with bypass services, cheap is not the same as free, especially at the scale spam runs at. I imagine a mail form that obviously doesn't incorporate a CAPTCHA is going to garner some attention. It might work for weeks or months if it's not being paid attention to, so that's probably worth them spending a few minutes looking at.
Spam doesn't scale on a small site. Say you can absolutely fill a small site with spam comments to the point that 99% of comments are spam. Very few people visit the site (it's small after all). Fewer still read the comments. Virtually none of those will click on the (usually obvious) spam links. And still fewer will buy, making you money. If you spend 2 hours customizing your spam script to circumvent anti-spam measures on a small site, you might as well flip burgers at McDonald's, you'll make significantly more money.
Spam works at scale only when you're not customizing. I'm involved with quite a few small to medium and a few larger sites (the largest getting around 4m PI/month) and though we use WP we get virtually no spam because of trivial deviations. We get an immense amount of attempts though. The little we do get is obviously manual spam: in the correct language, with content targeted to the individual page/post content (beyond "very interesting article, I wrote about the same" one-size-fits-all).
This is as primitive as it gets. I didn’t get a single spam mail in all that time.
The idea is not to outrun your competition, it is to become a special target that would demand special work to successfully get into. Bots are dumb as long as the humans behind them don’t give them a hint how to deal with your site.
And if you’re really that valuable of a target, you can step it up a notch or even switch to google’s data collecting solution.
I am much more confident in ReCAPTCHA of stopping bots compared to any roll your own solution.
I dont want to hope that an alternative is good enough for my needs. I want the best when it comes to protecting my site.
Any alternative needs to have a proven track record and support to make consider replacing ReCAPTCHA.
Do you want your site "protected" from those users, too?
For my personal blog I managed to be spam free with a simple question/answer pair for 5 years. Took me a minute to implement and leaves my user data where it belongs.
You can use common knowledge or simple ambiguity of language. You can use simple math arithmetic, written in properly obfuscated html. and randomly generated on each page load. You can use custom question about the content of the article (helps with informed answers).
On a small blog of mine just one question with one answer on the contact form prevented all spam for over 5 years already although it would be trivial to exploit in a targeted attack.
Targeted attacks are rare unless your captcha protects a juicy target that is worth a targeted attack at some point.
Are there alternatives in situations like this?
And I would even hazard a guess that the TOS specify that Google will not retain/link that information, considering that's how Analytics is run.
[0]: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/umatrix/
I am as well. We enabled Recaptcha on one site and had spam signups drop by 99%. Unfortunately, regular signups also dropped by 20% because people give up when they hit Recaptcha and don't absolutely, seriously need what it's protecting. To us, joining the arms race against the spammers (which, so far, we've easily won) was much more profitable than turning away legitimate customers.
>>> You probably don’t need ReCAPTCHA
Probably being the keyword, because you probably aren't a big enough site for a dedicated attacker. Or for a dedicated attacker to be an issue.
And really, let's s/attacker/bot/g. Not every bot is a problem. Not every bot is an attacker, i.e. someone doing something malicious.
Can you please provide a few ready-to-use links?
You can pay for Azure and other STT engines to solve it for you an dthe results are usually a bit better.
I'm much more afraid of ReCaptcha blocking bonafide users. It's a harmful obstacle that punishes legitimate users for not sharing as much data as possible with Google.
Even if you really need a captcha, there are better solutions out there.
I recently spent time ensuring our Auth pages’ HTML could be easily cached outside of our application servers. They were a common target of DDOS attacks because we were generating a unique nonce for CSRF protection.
Randomizing form field names does not defeat a targeted attacker (and we have definitely been a target), prevents HTML caching, and will prevent auto filling fields by browsers and password managers.
Additionally it will be terrible from a usability and accessibility standpoint.
It’s trivial to target a form field by the text/label around it so those would need to be randomized as well.
I would MUCH prefer the recaptcha over this!
I wholly agree that this would not help, but for the sake of completeness, I want to point out that <input autocomplete=""> [0] is designed to solve this, by decoupling input field names from their intent.
But Chrome is playing dumb about it [1]. And of course, the spambots will just adapt to parse the autocomplete info…
[0]: https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/HTML/Attributes...
[1]: https://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/ar1qj1/chromiu...
ReCaptcha is by definition terrible from a usability and accessibility standpoint too, just has all the privacy problems too.
The ball had an animal in it and I was asked to bounce the ball, causing it to rotate. I had to bounce the ball with just enough force to get it to land so the animal was positioned upright. After several failed attempts, I gave up.
On my own site I see 1 or 2 spam posts a week although I get the feeling it’s real people doing the registration. They sign up, make 1 comment, get reported very quickly, then banned.
We haven’t had to make our signup/registration system that strong in of itself though, because most of our largest clients end up using some SSO method exclusively and will have their own prevention methods.
`autocomplete="off"`
Huge pain
https://codesandbox.io/s/static-jkvzs
The other trick is to add a random string/number in from of the name attribute e.g. name="348349_name". This prevents autofill. Interestingly 1Password and LastPass are smart enough to infer that it's a name or email field.
For the honeypot, random number + word makes it ignored by autofill/1password
looked into it again and it seems Chrome enabled it again in Chrome 68: https://stackoverflow.com/questions/25823448/ng-form-and-aut...
Firefox had it disabled too but enabled it back again: https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/Security/Securi...
And IE is just a cluster f.
My point being, Autocomplete off is not a valid solution as it can break at an updates notice, and the code hacks, while may work, are a pain to deal with
I'm sure this won't work for everyone, but if your small, I highly recommend giving it a go.