New Anti-Spam Tactics | Daniel Miessler

New Anti-Spam Tactics | Daniel Miessler

So I’m trying out a new anti-spam combination:

  1. Re-captcha

  2. Akismet

If you have any problems with the CAPTCHA software, just reload the image or try the audio option. What I like most about the re-captcha system is that it doesn’t dump your post if you don’t get the CAPTCHA right. I tried another implementation a while back that did this, and got several emails threatening my safety.

Another cool thing about the re-captcha system is that every time you use it you’re helping a good cause. The re-captcha system is part of a project to digitize books, which is done using OCR software. Well, when the computer has a problem reading in a given piece of text it needs a human to help determine what the word is.

That’s what this system does — it’s using us to identify what the computer couldn’t do. And that just happens to be a good way to also keep those same words from being easily guessed by a computer. Or, to put it another way, if the words were easily guessed by computers (hence making a CAPTCHA text) they wouldn’t be in the system in the first place. Pretty cool.

Anyway, spam seemed to be picking up quite a bit recently and I needed to switch tactics due to the overhead of managing it. Let me know if this is unbearable, however, and I’ll adjust as necessary.


Source link

About Cybernoz

Security researcher and threat analyst with expertise in malware analysis and incident response.