CourseCast of the Week

Episode 0098, 04/25/2009

Title/Description: CAPTCHA GOTCHA and other tech headlines

Welcome to Course Technology's CourseCast of the week, Episode 98, recorded April 25th, 2009. This is Ken Baldauf bringing you this week's technology news and information. This CourseCast is brought to you by Course Technology. Check out www.cengage.com/coursetechnology for innovative textbooks and creative electronic learning solutions.

Only two weeks until the 100th CourseCast! In preparation for the 100th episode, I'd like to hear from you! Let me know what you like about Coursecasts and share any ideas you may have for the show. If you are a student or teacher, let me know the name of your school, and I'll give you a shout out. Email me at coursecasts@gmail.com today!

This week's CourseCast goes out to Kelly Smith and classmates at St. Johns River Community College in Florida, and to Owen Herman and his students at Metropolitan State College in Denver CO.

And now, the news.

Story 1 - CAPTCHA GOTCHA

Most of today's criminal hackers are in it for the money. A popular way for hackers to make money is to engineer systems that spew out illegal spam in a manner that is untraceable. One way this can be done is by creating malware that infects PCs creating botnets designed to spew spam. Another way is to create bogus user accounts on Web services like Yahoo! and Gmail, and use them to send spam.

Criminal hackers have engineered software to automate the process of creating accounts on Web services. In order to thwart automated account generators, Google, Yahoo, and other Web services make use of a technology called CAPTCHA. CAPTCHA stands for "Completely Automated Public Turing test to tell Computers and Humans Apart." CAPTCHA is the technology that requires users to decipher and type in a sequence of letters displayed in a contorted fashion on the screen. The theory is that humans are able to use intuition to decipher the jumbled letters and software isn't- or at least not until now.

This week a Vietnamese security company discovered a worm, it has named Gaptcha, that infects PCs for the purpose of setting up bogus gmail accounts. When the worm encounters Google's CAPTCHA, it sends the image of the contorted letters, to a remote server for deciphering, and moments later, the bogus account is generated. After many accounts have been generated from a single PC, Google servers get suspicious and block further efforts. When this occurs, the worm automatically removes itself from the victim's PC. With many infected PCs creating gmail accounts and sending them to a central server, hackers are able to create a large spamming army.

Now that software has cracked the CAPTCHA, Web companies are going to have to come up with new ways of determine whether new accounts are being generated by humans or an AI. Options include Photo and Image CAPTCHA's animated CAPTCHAs, sound CAPTCHA's and multiple choice questions. No matter what technology is employed, there may be no stopping hackers. Some hacking methods make use of human solvers - low cost human workers, often times in developing countries, that work with botnet armies cracking CAPTCHA's one after another all day for low wages.

Worm solves Gmail's CAPTCHA, creates fake accounts [Security Central]

That's it for this week's CourseCast. But this is just the tip of the iceberg! Go to coursecasts.course.com for links to the full stories covered in this CourseCast. There you will also find discussion questions for use in your course, and the CourseCast Archives. Don't forget to email me with your comments and suggestions for the show at coursecasts.gmail.com. Until next time have a great week and be sure to take advantage of the Power -- of Technology!