An article in PC Magazine by Lance Ulanoff tells about our worst pretty bad fears coming true with regards to online security. A company by the name of RMG Technologies has developed a piece of software that circumvents the CAPTCHA security being used on online ticketing websites. This was most recently involved in a court case surrounding the North American tour of Hannah Montana.
The software allows ticketing brokers to spoof the websites and purchase blocks of tickets in a high-speed, automated, CAPTCHA passing process.
RMG’s software—and others like it—can apparently not only defeat CAPTCHA but actually perform the process faster than most people can. (That’s quite a trick, since it means fixing the text so it’s readable, OCR-ing it, and then typing it into the provided field). So the safeguard that was supposed to prove we’re human is now being done by a nonhuman at superhuman speeds. Ah, the irony.
Lance wraps up the article by saying that’s it’s not much of a large step to jump from getting around CAPTCHA security to purchase tickets to circumventing it for more nefarious activities.
All this just flies in the face of getting the “Best of Both Worlds” that Miley Cyrus sings about in one of her songs.
Original Article Link: Deep-Sixing CAPTCHA – Columns by PC Magazine
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