Gamers to help create bot-proof CAPTCHA
A new computer game designed by a researcher at Newcastle University could help to create CAPTCHA systems immune to attack from AI bots. Dr Jeff Yan's Magic Bullet game turns the validation of CAPTCHA characters into an online game. He hopes that it will help companies stay one step ahead of spammers, hackers and online criminals.
CAPTCHA (Completely Automated Public Turing Test to Tell Computers and Humans Apart) is widely used by websites such as Google and Facebook to defend against malicious bots that spread junk emails or grab thousands of free email accounts.
New CAPTCHA systems have to be developed all the time, as spammers are always trying to crack existing systems. Every innovation has to be manually checked against both human and computer users, to check that the distorted words and numbers are legible to genuine users while confusing automated bots. To fully evaluate the robustness of a CAPTCHA scheme, at least 10,000 segments usually have to be labelled.
