Mark's Blog » captcha http://blog.markbarnes.org The incoherent ramblings of Mark Barnes; Burnley FC supporter, technology evangelical and general web geek Sat, 31 Jul 2010 23:00:00 +0000 en hourly 1 http://wordpress.org/?v=3.0 phpBB3 CAPTCHA Cracked http://blog.markbarnes.org/2009/02/09/phpbb3-captcha-cracked/ http://blog.markbarnes.org/2009/02/09/phpbb3-captcha-cracked/#comments Mon, 09 Feb 2009 00:00:36 +0000 Mark http://blog.markbarnes.org/?p=462 Another milestone clocked up for spammers across the world as the phpBB3 GD CAPTCHA has been officially cracked, causing an explosion of extra spam registrations and posts that most phpBB3 owners haven’t seen thus far. Unfortunately it was only a matter of time before the spammers’ automated tools were tailored to be able to read the phpBB3 CAPTCHA; however if you are keeping up with phpBB development you would have seen some interesting improvements going into trunk for 3.0.5 that hopefully will help with this spammer plague that we all seem to have come down with.

In another spammer experiment I’ve added another phpBB3 board with the GD CAPTCHA enabled on its default setting to the rotation script that governs which honeypot the spammers get sent to. The CAPTCHA settings are the same ones that are distributed with the phpBB (3.0.4) download package (GD set to on, foreground noise set to off, and X and Y noise set to 25).

Of course, I’d love nothing more than to present all of you with the opportunity to use bbProtection however we aren’t quite at that stage yet. However, now would be a great time to lend us a hand by contributing to our ongoing “bbProtection Needs You” campaign; more information available on that over at the bbProtection Blog :-D .

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