Researchers Warn of CAPTCHA Security Flaws

Computer scientists recently developed software designed to defeat audio CAPTCHAs by exploiting flaws inherent in their design.

"Decaptcha is a two-phase audio-CAPTCHA solver that correctly breaks the puzzles with a 41-percent to 89-percent success rate on sites including eBay, Yahoo, Digg, Authorize.net, and Microsoft's Live.com," writes The Register's Dan Goodin. "The program works by removing background noise from the audio files, allowing only the spoken characters needed to complete the test to remain."

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^ I'm not sure where these folks have been. While this is a new variation on a theme, CAPTCHA has been cracked for at least 2 years or so, software freely available, not to mention Vladuz's ebay CAPTCHA extension