[support] Many false applications for accounts
Jamie Holly
hovercrafter at earthlink.net
Tue Apr 8 15:17:37 UTC 2014
And to the point that even humans have trouble seeing what they are!
There's been more than a few sites I decided "screw it" and not register
because their captcha was about impossible to read.
But when you think about it, everything else in a registration form can
be automated. My guess is a lot of these people have simple plugins they
have written for their browsers to fill out the forms, then those paid
humans only have to figure out the CAPTCHA. I remember years ago when
there were programs out there to bulk register Yahoo accounts. All you
had to do was enter the CAPTCHA for each one.
That just got me thinking. Something that might help is something
non-captcha that changes. Say a "check here to agree to our terms"
checkbox a lot of sites have. What if that got changed around to a few
different things:
- Check here to agree
- Check here to not-agree
- Enter "i agree" in the textbox.
If someone is manually registering each account, that would of course
not work, but if they are registering once and creating a "template" of
the registration for an automation process, then that might work out. To
even complicate it more, you could make it to where that area is
disabled or hidden until the person actually scrolls to the bottom of
the terms.
Like I said, it wouldn't stop them, but it would give them another hoop
to jump through and one that wouldn't be that bad on regular users.
Jamie Holly
http://hollyit.net
On 4/8/2014 8:03 AM, Philip_Wetzel at nhd.uscourts.gov wrote:
> That's true. What I meant is that they have succeeded in teaching
> computers to hack
> earlier versions of CAPTCHA. They've had to make the images more and more
> complicated.
>
>
>
> From: Walt Daniels <wdlists at gmail.com>
> To: MBR <mbr at arlsoft.com>,
> Cc: "support at drupal.org" <support at drupal.org>,
> support-bounces at drupal.org
> Date: 04/07/2014 10:10 PM
> Subject: Re: [support] Many false applications for accounts
> Sent by: support-bounces at drupal.org
>
>
>
> Correct! There is no possible fix for hiring real humans to register unless
> you have an out of bounds way of telling your friends a secret that they
> can supply when asked. It can't be something that the bad guys can find
> with an internet search such as the price of gold on Feb 3, 2010. It needs
> to something as hard as a hard password. At which point you may as well
> just register them yourself and let them recover their password to set it
> to something they know.
>
>
> On Mon, Apr 7, 2014 at 9:43 PM, MBR <mbr at arlsoft.com> wrote:
> CAPTCHA = "Completely Automated Public Turing test to tell Computers and
> Humans Apart"
>
> CAPTCHA doesn't necessarily imply sending a distorted image. It's any
> test that can distinguish between computers and humans. So, if the bad
> guys are able to hire humans on the cheap, then CAPTCHA has been broken
> in a way that can't be fixed.
> Mark
> On 4/7/14 7:28 AM, Philip_Wetzel at nhd.uscourts.gov wrote:
> The CAPTCHA code has been broken a number of times and they've
> re-engineered it. If it's not currently effective, they'll
> probably come
> up
> with a fix. The game goes on.
>
>
>
> From: MBR <mbr at arlsoft.com>
> To: support at drupal.org, wdlists at gmail.com,
> Date: 04/05/2014 12:31 PM
> Subject: Re: [support] Many false applications for accounts
> Sent by: support-bounces at drupal.org
>
>
>
> It's been reported that the bad guys have set up CAPTCHA-breaking
> networks
> that distribute the CAPTCHA to people in third-world countries who
> get paid
> a small amount for each CAPTCHA they solve. It's looking like
> CAPTCHA is no
> longer effective.
>
> I had to solve this problem for a site that was getting hit by
> about 15
> bogus account-registrations per hour, even though CAPTCHA was
> enabled. The
> most effective approach I know of at present is to install a module
> that
> does reverse-CAPTCHA - i.e. instead of asking the human to prove
> he's
> human, it tricks the malware that's trying to pretend to be a human
> into
> demonstrating behavior that proves it's just a dumb piece of
> software. It
> does this by adding additional <input> tags to every <form> and
> making them
> invisible with CSS. A human won't fill in these fields because
> they won't
> be displayed. But software that's just parsing HTML will find these
> fields
> and fill them in, thus allowing the code on your server to
> distinguish
> between responses from humans and responses from machines.
>
> Among the modules that implement this approach are Honeypot,
> Botcha, and
> Spamicide. I tried Botcha, but I ran into installation problems. I
> didn't
> try Spamicide because it had a critical bug report claiming that
> the
> installation erased the default/files directory. Honeypot
> installed
> without problems and instantly cut the rate of bogus registrations
> dramatically. It didn't cut it all the way to 0 as I'd hoped it
> would, but
> the rate dropped from about 15/hr. to about 3/day.
> Mark Rosenthal
> mbr at arlsoft.com
> On 4/5/14 8:51 AM, Walt Daniels wrote:
> I get them to, but it is not mollom's fault. They are
> actually
> registering and typing the captcha just like a legitimate
> user. In
> our case they even have to use a legitimate email as they
> cannot do
> anything more than an anonymous user until the verify their
> email. I
> don't see any pattern I could apply to the user names that
> would
> distinguish them from our valid users who have some pretty
> weird
> usernames. You could find or right a module that enforced
> using "real
> names", i.e. John Doe. But I even got some like that that
> turn out to
> be spammers.
>
>
> On Sat, Apr 5, 2014 at 8:13 AM, Linda Romey
> <lromey at gmail.com> wrote:
> I am having the same issue. Have you contacted Mollom?
> That's on my
> to-do list. I'm not sure of the value of the monthly fee if
> I still
> have to continually monitor my site and delete spam
> accounts
> manually.
>
>
> On Sat, Apr 5, 2014 at 8:09 AM, James Rome
> <jamesrome at gmail.com>
> wrote:
> I have Mollom installed, but yet a handful of account
> applications
> escape their captcha/analysis each day. The problem is
> that the
> only
> obviously wrong field is the username, which is not listed
> as a
> field in
> the Mollom configuration. I get names such as:
> qropspension_5362
>
> Is there any other way to get rid of these would-be
> spammers?
>
> --
> James A. Rome
>
> http://jamesrome.net
>
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