Brett_Tabke - 5:47 am on Jan 11, 2011 (gmt 0)

It has become apparent from our customers and customers of other BB Systems that there is a targeted effort being made to spam forums world-wide. Unfortunately as part of that effort it appears that ReCaptcha may have been cracked as per this page: [vbulletin.com...]

Despite denials from Google, a security researcher continues to assert that the Search King’s reCAPTCHA system for protecting Web sites from spammers can be successfully exploited by Internet junk mail panderers. Researcher Jonathan Wilkins published a paper recently that included an analysis of reCAPTCHA’s security. In automated attacks he conducted against the system, he reported he had an alarming success rate of 17.5 percent. [allspammedup.com...]

Unlike most CAPTCHA systems, Google’s uses images with two words. That’s because Google uses reCAPTCHA for two purposes. Like other CAPTCHA systems, it’s designed to frustrate spammers, but it’s also incorporated into Google’s efforts to digitize books. When a word in a book scan can’t be recognized by Google’s OCR software, it’s sent to the reCAPTCHA pool. So when a person enters a reCAPTCHA phrase into a form, Google can discover what its OCR program couldn’t, without having to hire human editors to review scanning results.