When signing up for a free email account, you’ve probably encountered a CAPTCHA verification: it’s a graphic with characters partially obscured by random lines. The idea is that only humans can make out the text behind all the scribbles.

Unfortunately, malware has been spotted in the wild which has a fairly good success rate at reading these symbols, paving the way for spammers to generate thousands of accounts a day. From these accounts, they can blast out many messages before getting caught. And antispam services which depend upon identifying high-risk sources of spam are powerless against messages that come from reputable sources like Hotmail.

The battle might be waged on several fronts – with CAPTCHA using different approaches for validation, and webmail services starting to filter outgoing mail. Perhaps they will detect and shut down repeated attempts at account generation from the same computer.

The net of this for the average user is that they can expect their mailboxes to continue to be filled with spam for some time.

Check this blog entry for more information.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, April 15th, 2008 at 9:40 pm and is filed under News. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Responses are currently closed, but you can trackback from your own site.