CAPTCHA Beaking is a Profitable Enterprise

CAPTCHA breaking, or "solving", has been turned into a lucrative industry in Inida, as Ars Technica reports. CAPTCHAs flummox bots, but may be doomed by CAPTCHA farmers. CAPTCHA's for some time have been fairly ineffective, and this adds another tool into spammers arsenal for getting past really good ones that are impossible or too time-consuming to break using automated programs.

Dancho Danchev, writing for ZDNet, reports on the emergence of CAPTCHA-breaking as an economic model in India. He reports that it's impossible to untangle the corporate web that's unfurled, given that large CAPTCHA-breaking companies often farm work out to multiple smaller businesses, but all available information suggests that CAPTCHA-cracking (referred to as "solving" in marketing parlance) is a booming sector of the Indian tech economy. Danchev reports that CAPTCHA-crackers can earn more per day than they can as legitimate data processing centers.

Earlier this year I asked Should you rely on CAPTCHAs to stop malicious behavior?