IRONIC, isn’t it. Those distorted words that websites have you type to prove you aren’t a machine are in fact easy for software to decode, mainly because words are chosen with little insight into how secure they are.
“Many websites use CAPTCHAs, and there are a lot of designs floating around,” explains Elie Bursztein from the in California. These mimic the original puzzles developed by Luis von Ahn and colleagues at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.
Bursztein and colleagues decided to investigate how the different methods fared across as many sites as possible to work out…
