Hackers turn employers! Will pay you to spread more spam

Tuesday, 27 April 2010, 21:49 IST
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Hackers turn employers! Will pay you to spread more spam
Bangalore: After facing stricter rules in the U.S, Spammers over there have started outsourcing the work to in India, Bangladesh, China and other developing countries to tackle the simple tests known as captchas, which ask web users to type in a string of semiobscured characters to prove they are humans and not a spam-generating robot. According to online exchanges like Freelancer.com, where dozens of such projects are bid on every week, these spammers are paying 80 cents (35.43) to $1.20 (Rs 53.14) per 1,000 deciphered boxes. Luis von Ahn, a Carn egie Mellon computer science professor who was a pioneer in developing captchas, estimates that thousands of people in developing countries, primarily in Asia, are solving these puzzles for pay. But internet firms like Google say that they do not worry a lot about people being paid to decode captchas because they are one of several tools that websites use to secure themselves. Some sites, for instance, might also send confirmation codes as text messages to cellphones, which then have to be entered into a separate verification page before new email accounts are activated.

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