Every day, it is estimated that up to 200 million captcha tests are performed online. If your website lacks a captcha verification, here’s all you need to know about them and how they might help your business or blog.
CAPTCHA is an acronym that stands for ‘completely automated public Turing test to tell computers and humans apart’
CAPTCHA is a tool that protects websites from bots by creating and grading tests that people can pass but bots cannot. It is an effective security strategy that protects websites from destructive viruses and other threats to their site and information.
The reason is simple; people can read deformed writing, but computer programs cannot. By completing the CAPTCHA, the website determines that your log-in is safe and legitimate.
CAPTCHAs play an important role in keeping the internet spam-free and making everyone’s experience a little bit better. reCAPTCHA also makes positive use of the human effort spent in solving CAPTCHAs by using the solutions to digitize text, annotate images, and build machine learning datasets. This in turn helps preserve books, improve maps, and solve hard AI problems.
Google
What Do Captcha Forms Look Like?
Captcha tests were first used in the late 1990s and consisted of a panel of masked letters or numbers. Blurring and stretching the letters. It would then be the internet user’s responsibility to recognize these letters and type them into a different section of the form. They passed the test if they correctly interpreted the letters.
Google has launched a captcha program called reCAPTCHA. The technology behind this test is more investigative than that behind the classic captchas.
reCAPTCHA understands that filling out a captcha form can sometimes feel like a waste of time. So, when a user visits a website, reCAPTCHA analyzes that user’s behavior to determine how human-like it is.
If the reCAPTCHA service finds the behavior to be fairly realistic, it will not deliver a full captcha test. It will simply prompt the user to check a box to certify that he or she is not a robot. If the user’s interaction with a page appears to be robotic, they will be challenged to answer a more difficult puzzle.
Why CAPTCHA is So Important For Your Website?
Captchas, in general, prevent hackers from exploiting internet services by preventing robot software from submitting fake or malicious online requests.
CAPTCHA Can:
- Stop hackers from employing robots to put in repeated fake responses to ensure the security of internet polls.
- Prevent brute force attacks on internet accounts, in which hackers try hundreds of different passwords to log in (guessing).
- Prevent hackers from creating several email accounts that they would then use for malicious reasons.
- Stop cybercriminals from spamming blogs and news content pages with suspicious comments and links to other websites.
- Prevent ticket touts from employing robots to buy tickets in bulk for concerts and performances.
- To improve the security of ecommerce.
Case Studies
There are a few case studies of organizations and enterprises that have suffered as a result of their websites’ lack of captcha forms. One of the first cases occurred in the late 1990s, when the social news website Slashdot released a poll asking people to vote for the finest computer science graduate course in the United States.
Students from two colleges, Carnegie Mellon and MIT, employed automated algorithms to vote for their schools repeatedly, causing the poll to become skewed and worthless.
Huge supermarket chain Target suffered a data breach in 2013 that affected 70 million consumers.
They had a vendor portal that didn’t have a captcha or any type of human authentication, so a bot was able to get into the system and start sending data back to people who shouldn’t have it.
Conclusion
CAPCTHA protects your favorite websites from spam and abuse, allowing you to browse them without having to compete with robots and abusive scripts. CAPTCHA’s main purpose is to produce a test that is simple and straightforward for any human to answer but nearly impossible for a computer to solve.
Visit Cybersecurity blog category to learn more about how to protect your website from attacks.
