Chalk up another win for the spammers. According to security company BitDefender, the Captchas Type Challenge Response System has been compromised. The Captchas system is the system used to generate those funky looking letters when you sign up at certain websites. The system was designed based on the theory that computers could not automatically read the swirly letters (Or humans for that matter). The general concept behind Captchas was to cripple the scripts that the spammers setup to automatically generate email accounts to spam with on services such as Hotmail or Yahoo. Since these scripts cannot read the letters generated and sent to the user’s screen, they would not be able to generate the fake accounts to spam with.

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