Live Hotmail CAPTCHA Broken in Average of Six Seconds

[engine]

A new bot can crack defences erected by Microsoft to keep spammers from creating large numbers of accounts on its Live Hotmail service within seconds, a security researcher said Friday.

Dan Hubbard, vice president of security research at Websense, said the bot broke Live Hotmail's CAPTCHA (Completely Automated Public Turing Test to Tell Computers and Humans Apart) within six seconds, on average.

"In the past, though, it was kind of questionable whether the CAPTCHA breaking was automated," Hubbard said Friday, noting that there had been some evidence that spammers were paying people to decode and type in the CAPTCHA characters. "But the bot's breaking [CAPTCHA] in six seconds, so it's definitely automated."

Live Hotmail CAPTCHA Broken in Average of Six Seconds [pcworld.co.nz]

[bill]

The good thing that will inevitably come out of this is that those indecipherable CAPTCHA puzzles may morph into something truly usable. CAPTCHA doesn't have to mean a bunch of difficult to OCR letters and numbers.