Reports from Vietnam suggest that those evil old spammers have a new trick up their sleeves in the shape of a worm that can crack Gmail's CAPTCHA system and register new accounts automatically.
The worm was detected by BKIS in Hanoi and has been named W32.Gaptcha.Worm. It infects Windows PCs and causes them to launch Internet Explorer, which it sends to the Gmail signup page.
Remote decoding
From there it fills in the various required fields and sends the CAPTCHA image to a remote server that decodes it and returns the deciphered image back to the worm, which ultimately erases itself when Gmail blocks repeated signups from that PC.
The result each time, however, is one more email account from which to annoy 99.9 per cent of the internet-using world with offers of Viagra and free money.
Google has yet to comment on the new threat, but has often underlined in the past that it is constantly updating its anti-spam techniques.
Your comments (2) Click to add a new comment
alan1205
April 27th
2. It was only a matter of time before this happened. I'm sure others as well as Gmail will soon be getting this as well. I know that some hackers are employing people in the 3rd world to sit in front of screens and enter Captcha codes. We'll probably never get away from that, but there must be something that can be done to stop automated digital ways of doing it.
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timdot
April 27th
1. This might explain the spam I've been getting recently in my inbox on my Gmail account (whereas it 99% of the time goes into my spam folder) - all seemingly coming from gmail accounts.
CAPTCHA beating programs are amazing, though annoying. Whilst it annoys me that there'll be an up in the amount of spam that I receive, it's pretty amazing that they've managed to beat something designed like that.
Hopefully google will sort it out soon.
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