Alexey Kolupaev admitted that he makes a CAPTCHA-recognizer for spammers

The effectiveness of CAPTCHA begins to decline as OCR systems evolve. Tests have become so complex that people have difficulty coping with them. You need to look closely to distinguish between letters and numbers on these smeared, handwritten, noisy pictures.

Large IT corporations are actively conducting research in this area. Both eBay and Microsoft are working on inventing more efficient versions of CAPTCHA. One option is to recognize animals , not letters.

Some independent researchers are working on the opposite task - and they sometimes achieve considerable success. For example, the 25-year-old Ukrainian hacker Alexei Kolupaev created a program that can pass almost any test. About this newspaper New York Times.

Alexey Kolupaev works in one of Kiev Internet companies, and in his spare time solves the problems of optical character recognition. Together with their friend Yuri Ogienko, they created an effective OCR program, which is “tailored” specifically for the CAPTCHA solution. Ukrainian entrepreneurs also founded a company to commercialize this technology. By the way, their site is the best information source on the Internet on this topic. It explains in detail how to crack the CAPTCHA protection system on PayPal, MySpace and other sites.

Ukrainians say they can tune their program to any type of CAPTCHA solution. For a similar setup, they charge from $ 100 to $ 5000, depending on the complexity of the task. Among Kolupaev’s clients there are also spammers.

“Any system can be hacked, each has its own weaknesses,” says Alexey. - If you created a program that recognizes only one of a hundred pictures, this is not a problem. You just have to knock on the site a hundred times - and you're inside. ”

via NY Times