Have you ever gotten annoyed because you just can't seem to figure out that Captcha test on the first go? Well, prepare to get more annoyed as a complex new bot is able to beat it with 100% certainty.
In a paper fittingly titled “Breaking reCAPTCHAv2“, as spotted by Tom's Hardware, researchers studied and utilised the “YOLO” model to solve image-based captcha puzzles.
While it was previously only able to solve puzzles up to 71% of the time, this study showed that it could solve 100% of captchas presented to it. The paper states “Our findings indicate that current captcha mechanisms are not immune to the rapidly advancing field of artificial intelligence.”
Captchas are those annoying tests you have to take before certain websites will let you visit, log in, or do other things on them. They're a form of Turing Test, designed to parse the difference between a human user and a bot. This can be used to avoid inflated user numbers on sites and stop bots from spamming messages or scraping data.
Importantly, Captchas can also mitigate DDOS (distributed denial of service) attacks, where bots access a site on mass to overload servers and effectively take it down. If bots can solve Captchas, this could pose a not-insignificant security risk to websites.
It's worth noting this bot currently only works for Google's reCaptchav2. Google's reCaptchav3 launched earlier this year and it can tell based on your website usage and behaviour whether or not you are a bot, which is much harder for AI to crack.
Unfortunately, some users will not be able to get through v3 due to their lack of consistent website usage and will be forced to use v2 either way, suggesting it's not inherently safer, just more convenient for some.
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The study itself is cautious of the future of this tech and the need for Captcha to further evolve alongside it. “Our findings mark a crucial point in the ongoing dialogue between AI capabilities and digital security. They highlight the necessity for captcha technologies to evolve proactively, staying ahead of AI’s rapid advancements.
“This is not just an academic challenge; it is a vital step toward ensuring the continued reliability and safety of our online environments.”
This does sound like an important issue, but I can't lie, I'm more bothered by the fact an AI is more consistent than me at beating Captchas.
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