
These shady enterprises are so ubiquitous that many can be found with a quick Google search, including: Cybercriminals subscribe to a service for CAPTCHA solutions, which streamline into their automation tools via APIs, populating the answers on the target website. A common method is to use a CAPTCHA solving service, which utilizes low-cost human labor in developing countries to solve CAPTCHA images. There are multiple ways CAPTCHA can be defeated.

The good guys responded with “hardened” CAPTCHAs but the result remains the same: the test that attempts to stop automation is circumvented with automation. These days, organizations use CAPTCHA in an attempt to prevent more sinister automated attacks like credential stuffing.Īlmost as soon as CAPTCHA was introduced, however, cybercriminals developed effective methods to bypass it.


In the 90s, this meant preventing spam bots. The CAPTCHA (Completely Automated Public Turing test to tell Computers and Humans Apart), was originally designed to prevent bots, malware, and artificial intelligence (AI) from interacting with a web page.
