Captcha is no longer the property of a human: a bot manages to unlock it

Until recently Captcha systems They were the primary way to distinguish humans from bots on the Internet, thus allowing only humanity to be present online.

CAPTCHA stands for Completely Automated Public Turing Test, which is designed to tell computers apart from humans. Google’s reCAPTCHA v2 system, used in the new study, tests users by asking them to select images containing objects such as traffic lights and crosswalks.

Using advanced machine learning techniques, researchers from the Swiss university ETH Zurich solved 100% of the captchas generated by Google’s popular reCAPTCHAv2 product using the same number of attempts as human users.

The results, published on September 13, show that “modern AI technologies can exploit image-based CAPTCHAs,” the authors write.

“This has been going on for a while,” said Matthew Green, an associate professor of computer science at the Johns Hopkins Institute for Information Security. “The idea behind CAPTCHA was that humans were better at solving these puzzles than computers. We’re learning that’s not true.”

In response to improving potential bots To solve captcha, companies like Google, which launched its third-generation reCAPTCHA product in 2018, are constantly improving their products.

“Bots are getting smarter and smarter,” Sandy Carielli, principal analyst at Forrester, told Decrypt. “What worked a few weeks ago might not work today.”

“The best players are constantly evolving because they have to,” she said. “The evolution is in detection models and providing the right responses to not only block bots, but to make it so costly for the bots that they go elsewhere.”

If CAPTCHA disappears, it could have serious consequences for many advertisers and websites.

“It’s a big problem for advertisers and the people who run the services if they don’t know if 50% of their users are real,” Green said. “Fraud was a big problem when you had to hire people to do it, and now that AI can do fraud for you, it’s an even bigger problem.”