Yahoo! Captcha Broken.
A group of Russian hackers has broken Yahoo’s Captcha (a computer program can read it). It has about 35% accuracy, which is somewhat low, but enough when considering that the program could be run hundreds of thousands of times per day.
Although many Captchas have been broken before using computer vision techniques, this is, to my knowledge, the only project that actually released the code.
In case you’ve never heard the term Captcha - it’s the obfuscated numbers and letters you are required to identify when filling in many web forms. It helps distinguish between a human and computer. Captcha has been commonly used in web forms for years. Although the average person has no idea what they’re for - there are many benefits to them. They help cut back on spam, brute force attacks, denial of service attacks, and some forms of phishing - all by preventing bots from automatically submitting forms.
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