Hotmail CAPTCHA: cracked in 20 seconds
By Davey Winder in Editorial
Posted in Data Protection, Spam, Security, Microsoft on
Although many people would like you to believe otherwise, the Completely Automated Public Turing test to tell Computers and Humans Apart (better known as CAPTCHA) is not foolproof. Yahoo! knows this, Google knows this, and now it would look like Microsoft knows it as well.
According to security researcher Sumeet Prasad at Websense the Microsoft Live Hotmail service CAPTCHA system has been busted wide open.
This is made all the more embarrassing for Microsoft courtesy of one small detail: just a few short months ago Microsoft had redesigned the CAPTCHA authentication it uses in order to prevent automated bot registration.
According to Websense “As the latest attack shows, those efforts have failed.” Its research suggests that the kind of anti-CAPTCHA attacks Microsoft is feeling are part of a strategy of escalation on the part of the spammer gangs in order to ensure that they can continue to exploit Microsoft branding and trust in order to sell their wares.
Worryingly, it appears that this latest attack is not the usual automated bot account creation system using command and control templates, but instead a much more sophisticated effort involving automated but encrypted communications between the spammer bots and compromised machines in order to secure the cracking attempts. Well, I say attempts but I mean successes. According to Prasad the success rate in converting a CAPTCHA cracking attempt into a fully active Live Hotmail account is as high as 20 percent. That’s one in every five attempts being successful.
If that were not frightening enough, it takes just 20 seconds from start to finish to do the cracking.
A full step by step expose of the technology and techniques employed can be found here.
Rated: 100% (1 votes)
Loading ...Comment by - March 19, 2009 on 10:09 am
Whythey have changed the CAPTCHA system… what’s the reason… how to crack hotmail CAPTCHA…
Comment by - March 19, 2009 on 10:10 am
Why they have changed the CAPTCHA system… what’s the reason… how to crack hotmail CAPTCHA…
Pingback by - October 5, 2009 on 11:56 pm
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