Alexey Kolupayev confessed that he is making a CAPTCHA recognizer for spammers.

The effectiveness of CAPTCHA begins to decline as OCR systems evolve. Tests have become so difficult that people can hardly cope with them. You need to carefully look to discern the letters and numbers in these smeared, handwritten, noisy pictures.

Large IT-corporations are actively conducting research in this area. Both eBay and Microsoft are working on inventing more efficient versions of CAPTCHA. One option is to recognize animals , not letters.

Some independent researchers are working on the opposite problem - and sometimes they achieve considerable success. For example, 25-year-old Ukrainian hacker Alexey Kolupayev created a program that can pass almost any test. About this newspaper New York Times.

Alexey Kolupayev works in one of the Kiev Internet companies, and in his spare time he solves the problem of optical character recognition. Together with his friend Yuri Ogienko, they created an effective OCR program that was “tailored” specifically for the CAPTCHA solution. Ukrainian entrepreneurs also founded the company for the commercial promotion of this technology. By the way, their website is the best information source on the Internet on this topic. It details how to hack the CAPTCHA-protection system on PayPal, MySpace and other sites.
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Ukrainians say they can customize their program to solve any type of CAPTCHA. For a similar setup, they charge from $ 100 to $ 5000, depending on the complexity of the task. Among Kolupayev’s clients there are also spammers.

“Any system can be hacked, each has its own weaknesses,” says Alexey. - If you created a program that recognizes only one of a hundred pictures, this is not a problem. You just need to knock on the site a hundred times - and you're inside. "

via NY Times