You must have encountered those Captcha tests where you try to choose the fire hydrant for minutes to prove that you are not a robot. A new study on this topic reveals the futility of the effort users spend every day to solve these puzzles. According to the research, bots are more successful than humans in the “I am not a robot” test.i am not a robot
Bots are better and significantly faster than humans at solving Captcha tests, according to an extensive new study examining the security system used on more than 100 popular websites. Although this issue is contradictory, in fact, automated bots are an important threat to the internet world. Because bots can pretend to be human users and engage in undesirable activities such as scraping content, creating accounts, and fake comments or reviews. Or they can consume the limited resource of the website.
For over two decades, Captchas have been used by websites as security controls to block potentially malicious bots by presenting puzzles that must be simple for humans to solve but very difficult for computers.For example, earlier versions of Captcha required users to transcribe distorted text from an image, but with advances in computer vision and machine learning, bots were soon able to recognize text with near perfect accuracy. Captchas, which entered an arms race with bots, have since become an annoying presence on the internet and have become increasingly difficult for bots and humans alike to solve.
A new, yet peer-reviewed study published on arXiv reveals that bots can easily solve Captcha tests, revealing the unnecessary hassle users spend every day solving these puzzles. In the study by scientists from the University of California, 200 most popular websites were evaluated and it was found that 120 of them still use Captcha.1,000 online participants from different backgrounds in terms of location, age, gender and education level were included in the study to perform 10 captcha tests on these sites and measure their level of difficulty. The researchers found that many bots described in scientific journals were able to beat humans in these tests for both speed and accuracy.
Some Captcha tests took 9 to 15 seconds for human participants to solve, with accuracy hovering between 50 and 84 percent. On the other hand, bots were able to achieve near-perfect results while it took less than a second to solve these tests. In general, although the accuracy rate of bots varies between 85-100 percent, it is stated that the majority of them are above 96 percent.
It was also found that bots’ solving times were “significantly lower” or nearly the same as humans in almost all cases. As existing Captchas do not meet the security goal required to keep bots out, the researchers call for better and more dynamic approaches to protect websites.
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