Sometimes they are actual words and other times, they are plain gibberish distorted by shape, size, capitalization, or orientation. These are the most common, and they require you to look at the distorted text to identify the real message. Types of CAPTCHAĬAPTCHA is either text-based, picture-based, or sound-based, and the odds are that you’ve encountered all three. As a result, more sophisticated CAPTCHAs, like Google’s reCAPTCHA, have been developed to increase website security. The more simple bots will return irregular and incomprehensible letters or click the wrong images, making it obvious that they are not human.Īdvanced bots, on the other hand, can use a variety of strategies to read these distorted images and bypass the test easily. Users need to input what they see into the provided field, and if they answer correctly, they are granted access to the protected web area. With images, there’s some sort of distortion that makes it harder for bots to use OCR. With letters, they are usually misshapen, washed out, or mixed up with a lot of gibberish, so only actual humans can interpret them. CAPTCHA guards everything, from spammy blog comments to even unauthorized downloads.Ī CAPTCHA test will show the users images that are unreadable by bots. The CAPTCHA test allows human users to access a website but keeps bots out. What exactly is CAPTCHA?ĬAPTCHA is a descriptive acronym, and it stands for Completely Automated Public Turing test to tell Computers and Humans Apart. In light of this, now’s a good time to understand how CAPTCHA works, how a CAPTCHA solver can bypass it so easily, and what it means for your website. That means the attackers controlling the bots can do everything from leaving spam comments and submitting invalid forms to abusing other services that your website provides. We may be at the end of an era because, according to research, half of all CAPTCHAs passed are completed by bots, not real users.

CAPTCHA has become increasingly sophisticated at catching advanced bots and keeping websites safe.

For attackers looking to access your website, a basic security test called CAPTCHA has been the first line of defence since its creation in 2000.

Captcha solving bots