Computer Vision is one of the best tools for busting CAPTCHAs. It is 2022, and we must use Machine Learning in everything. Most letter CAPTCHAs fear OCR the most, and it is evident by the way they warp and skew letters that they are trying to mitigate against this type of solver.Ģ022 Amazon CAPTCHA Computer Vision and Captcha We talked about OCR ( Optical Character Recognition) a little bit earlier, so let’s take our automation game to the next level and dive deeper using the same examples from above. After the initial setup, the bot would solve the CAPTCHA within seconds each time, but anywhere up to 1000 requests were being attempted before the bot would successfully solve the CAPTCHA. So, this was a standard, albeit time-consuming, way to set up protection. Most websites had never heard of website security at the time, let alone preventing a brute-forcing attack. There were limitations of the technology on both the defense (the generation of the CAPTCHA image at the time was a manual process) and the offense (the fuzzing process of the letters, which is the grainy bits and the line would trick the current Optical Character Recognition technology).

Realistically, all you had to do to bust a CAPTCHA in the early ’00s was to scrape every CAPTCHAs that would pop up and then write a script that would run through every potential answer until you got the right one. There was little in the way of security or protection. Around 2003, CAPTCHAs were popular for forum registration and voting for your favorite websites to win an award.

Captcha solving bots