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<font face="Times New Roman, Times, serif">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.<br>
<br>
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.<br>
<br>
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.<br>
</font>
<blockquote><font face="Times New Roman, Times, serif">Mark
Rosenthal</font><br>
<font face="Times New Roman, Times, serif"><a class="moz-txt-link-abbreviated" href="mailto:mbr@arlsoft.com">mbr@arlsoft.com</a></font><font
face="Times New Roman, Times, serif"> </font><br>
</blockquote>
<div class="moz-cite-prefix">On 4/5/14 8:51 AM, Walt Daniels wrote:<br>
</div>
<blockquote
cite="mid:CALZ-9dX5ANepeMJ=ND_hoEK4dYfrAm13awv7G6M_RaXO0xFSqw@mail.gmail.com"
type="cite">
<div dir="ltr">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.</div>
<div class="gmail_extra"><br>
<br>
<div class="gmail_quote">On Sat, Apr 5, 2014 at 8:13 AM, Linda
Romey <span dir="ltr"><<a moz-do-not-send="true"
href="mailto:lromey@gmail.com" target="_blank">lromey@gmail.com</a>></span>
wrote:<br>
<blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin:0 0 0
.8ex;border-left:1px #ccc solid;padding-left:1ex">
<div dir="ltr">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.</div>
<div class="HOEnZb">
<div class="h5">
<div class="gmail_extra"><br>
<br>
<div class="gmail_quote">On Sat, Apr 5, 2014 at 8:09
AM, James Rome <span dir="ltr"><<a
moz-do-not-send="true"
href="mailto:jamesrome@gmail.com"
target="_blank">jamesrome@gmail.com</a>></span>
wrote:<br>
<blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin:0 0 0
.8ex;border-left:1px #ccc solid;padding-left:1ex">
I have Mollom installed, but yet a handful of
account applications<br>
escape their captcha/analysis each day. The
problem is that the only<br>
obviously wrong field is the username, which is
not listed as a field in<br>
the Mollom configuration. I get names such as:
qropspension_5362<br>
<br>
Is there any other way to get rid of these
would-be spammers?<br>
<span><font color="#888888"><br>
--<br>
James A. Rome<br>
<br>
<a moz-do-not-send="true"
href="http://jamesrome.net" target="_blank">http://jamesrome.net</a><br>
<br>
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</font></span></blockquote>
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