How does the ‘I am not a robot’ CAPTCHA work?

Are you curious about why websites asks you for completing the CAPCHA for verifying that you are not a robot. Here are some interesting facts about CAPCHAs, who introduced CAPTCHA and why?

Later at the end of this blog you will get all answers about the history and origin of CAPTCHA. Today, our internet sites are well developed and the users using those sites have learnt most of the skills like programming and penetration testing that are used to build the sites and secure them. The internet provides this type of knowledge about every new technology and its loopholes and backdoors under the tags of “all information provided for educational purpose only” whether it is ethical or unethical.

Some data scientists as well as Blackhat guys get full advantage of this information. They write a code or program that is used to scrap the web for getting particular information from all the listed sites. That information might be the customer’s details or their publicly exposed email addresses. And later this information is used for marketing and analysis.

In most of the cases this bots are used for DDoS attacks that down the sites, and the site or service starts overloading. Also these bots are used to create multiple fake social media accounts, brute-forcing website admin panel with millions of passwords tests and used in captcha solving by selecting correct images.

The main origin of captcha is from the hackers community in 1980s, the hackers were using Leetspeak technique. Leetspeak is a technique that uses numbers that look like English letters or same as abbreviations that are hard to interpret by computers.

At the very beginning most of the pages on search engines were indexing fake sites manually so to prevent the submission of fake sites, AltaVista created a system that works like a CAPTCHA that requires the correct typing of some ugly format text or distorted characters into the box.

This types of pattern recognition can only be done by humans, so they use these three principles of human mind that are:

1. Humans can recognize texts in any filters and can read the unstructured texts.
2. Humans can distinguish between the two different layers of characters.
3. Humans can visualize the non written letters by creating different formations and combinations of letters in brain.

After knowing the limitations and complications of CAPTCHA, Luis von Ahn developed reCAPTCHA in 2003.Later it was sold to google in 2009.

reCAPTCHA/CAPTCHA is take any scanned word that cannot be recognized, but it is a word or character that can be interpretable by human. After typing the word correctly, you are identified as an authentic person/human by reCAPTCHA. Today reCAPTCHA helps to digitalize the human written books, and used in Google Cam to identify the texts from images and also digitalize the texts from maps and Google Images.

Who introduced CAPTCHA?

Manuel Blum, a professor at Carnegie Mellon, teaching computer science, conducted a study with , Nicholas Hopper, Luis von Ahn and John Langford. and they introduced CAPTCHA to the world.

What is the longform of CAPTCHA?

“Completely Automated Public Turing test to tell Computers and humans Apart” is a longform of CAPTCHA introduced by Manuel Blum.

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