Spam News

Google gobbles up reCAPTCHA, can it beat spam?

Thursday, September 17, 2009

Google announced Wednesday that it had acquired reCAPTCHA, the anti-fraud company that uses imaging technology to fight spam.

Google said on its official blog that the acquisition will allow it to improve security on the web, but reCAPTCHA's Optical Character Recognition technology is also vital to Google's massive scanning efforts related to the Google Books digitization.

CAPTCHAs are designed to allow humans to read characters that automated spam bots and web scrapers have trouble reading. It can be used to protect email addresses from spam and prevent bots from opening spam email accounts.

CAPTCHA is not an unbeatable defense against spam and hackers have written scripts that can get around it.

But, Adam O'Donnell, a security expert at antispam firm Cloudmark, said Google's acquisition can make CAPTCHA into a stronger antispam defense.

"Google already has the best computer-vision techniques. The way reCAPTCHA works, this means that Google will only be presenting CAPTCHA words that are very difficult for a bot to defeat," O'Donnell said, according to ZDNet's Zero Day blog. "By pushing up that boundary, it will make CAPTCHA technology much better."

ReCAPTCHA said its squiggly-word image puzzles are solved by humans about 200 million times a day, protecting more than 100,000 websites.