Captcha Online Security Hacked by Stripper

Hackers are getting assistance from a female stripper by the name of Mellisa. She is a digital girl that is helping spammer hack a security measure that has helped slow the spamming community.

To help solve the mystery and security behind Captcha text images, the spammers enlisted the help of Mellisa. By inserting and deciphering the text, users get to see explicit images. Seems like a fair enough trade-off. In the past many viruses have tricked people into opening booby-trapped attachments with the false promise of seeing explicit images, but this was one of the first to actually show people more images if people respond.

This software by Trend Micro and Panda Security that is helping to defeat the anti-spam security check is a Windows game that arrives on machines that are already infected with malicious software. The program comes to life when the Internet Explorer browser is used on infected machines. The Captcha-busting program can run on Windows 98, ME, NT, 2000, XP, and Server 2003. You win (getting to see the explicit image) by correctly typing the text shown in an accompanying image. This seems like an easy enough game with great rewards. The creators of the game in turn take the deciphered text that stop spam robots from automatically signing up to create accounts that can be put to illegal use. By getting people to type in the text the spammers can are also able to take over the accounts and use them to send junk mail.

This online anti-spam security measure of using a image of text is known as Captchas or “Completely Automated Public Turing test to tell Computers and Humans Apart”. Typically they feature a disfigured word or one overlaid with static that make it difficult for anyone but a human to decipher.

Since its fist arrival, many spammers and hackers have been vigorously working to defeat the system and regaining acess to net-based resources, such as e-mail accounts or blogging tools, they are designed to protect. Although this game seems like a bunch of fun and gaining popularity, it is likely to increase the annoyance of spam and weaken our hold in the War on Spam.