A team of researchers from various universities in the USA has created a new program that kills captcha protection. The program called decaptcha breaks captcha protected sites via the audio interface, and has a success rate of between 41% to 89%. That means that captcha protection on websites is essentially killed as bots can easily try hundreds of attempts every minute.

The Decaptcha program is a learning algorithm, meaning that you need to train it to recognize the various speech sounds from different captcha methods, but once its trained it will be able to auto-fill captcha code on sites using the same methods. The PDF paper is online at http://cdn.ly.tl/publications/decaptcha-audio.pdf

This is not good news for us, as this increases the ability for hackers to get into members areas protected by strongbox and other captcha enhanced security tools. I would really love to hear from them, hopefully someone will be by to explain how this will affect things!