Stanford research team cracks animated NuCaptcha
20.05.12
CAPTCHAs, as most are aware, are little boxes with numbers and/or letters displayed in them that users who wish to gain entry to a web site must decipher and type in correctly in order to gain access. They are used as barriers against bots that seek to gain entry for other purposes. Originally it was hoped that CAPTCHAs would prove to be sufficiently strong enough to keep out most any bot; unfortunately, as hackers found more reasons to overcome them (to view a video on YouTube millions of time, for example to pump up ad revenue) more ways were created to do so. To overcome this, security experts came up with audio and video (animated) versions. It didn’t take long for the research team at Stanford to crack the audio version, and now they’ve announced that they have done the same for the video version, though they suggest with a little tweaking, the video version might be made strong enough to ward off most bot attacks.
NuCaptcha differs from regular CAPTCHA in that the letters and/or numbers are made to move across the window box, like a ticker-tape. To make things even more challenging, the letters and/or numbers are also partially rotated as they move.
Source: PhysOrg.com