Defeating the Machines

  • 18 January 2021

Defeating the Machines

By: Dr Mohammad Reza Beheshti

It is humans not machines that you want as traffic to your site. Of course, there are good bots out there skimming your content as they should, it is the rise in bad bots that we are talking about. As technology has developed bots have become smarter - here at CyberSiara we aim to crush those bad bots right at the entry level of your website. In this weeks’ blog we will tell you how we are going about that, but first we will start with a little history on CAPTCHA.

 

What is CAPTCHA?

CAPTCHA is a set of challenge/response protocols that were introduced to protect online retailers and service providers from misuse and automated computer attacks. Text-based CAPTCHAs have always been the most popular form, and are used by most online service providers to differentiate between human users and bots. CAPTCHA was first introduced in 2000 before being purchased by Google at a later date. The first version had several flaws and our technical expert was one of those that was able to hack CAPTCHA. Over the past decade, various CAPTCHA models were introduced and used widely by major online service providers such as Yahoo!, Google and Microsoft as well as social networks such as Facebook, in order to provide better security against automated computer attacks. Most of these can be cracked using sophisticated recognition programs.

 

Why CAPTCHA is defeated by AI

As mentioned above the vast majority of text-based CAPTCHAs have been broken using the Optical Character Recognition (OCR) techniques thus, reinforcing the need for developing a secure and robust CAPTCHA model. As AI is developed further it becomes more sophisticated in being able to mimic human behaviour and so CAPTCHA becomes more easily defeated leaving a website open to harmful bot attacks.

Security and usability are the two fundamental issues that pose a trade-off in the design of a CAPTCHA; a hard CAPTCHA model could also be difficult for human users to resolve, which would affect its usability. So, in essence if your CAPTCHA system is too difficult it may put off the very human customers that are there to support your business growth.

 

The Human Visual System

The Human Visual System is a complex one. “Iconic Memory” is a type of sensory memory that is the key element in causing persistent vision, which plays a key role in the design of SiaraShield. This technology is what prevents AI from passing through our product.

 

If you would like to know about the product or indeed, talk to the developer of SiaraShield contact us on info@cybersiara.com

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