Snapchat’s anti-bot captcha system has been defeated in less than a day. Steven Hickson managed to program a piece of software that is able to detect features of Snapchat’s ghost mascot, which allows the software to choose with good accuracy the captcha images with the logo.
“This is an incredibly bad way to verify someone is a person because it is such an easy problem for a computer to solve.”
It took Hickson all of 30 minutes to create the program but admits it’s far from perfect. “I’m not saying it is perfect, far from it. I’m just saying that if it takes someone less than an hour to train a computer to break an example of your human verification system, you are doing something wrong,” writes Hickson in a blog post.
Snapchat has been under fire since the company allowed 4.6 million user names and phone numbers to be stolen using the company’s own developer tools. The company quickly issued an apology and fixed the security hole but security researchers are still scrutinizing Snapchat’s security efforts. And with a new security tool being cracked in 30 minutes, the scrutiny may be well deserved.
Source: Steves Computer Vision Blog
Via: Engadget
