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.

In an announcement posted on its site, BitDefender states that there is a new Trojan smart enough to bypass the Captchas system and it is generating about 500 or so new accounts every hour to spam with. The spam that is currently being generated with these new accounts is trying to entice users to visit a pharmacy website to by some online pharmaceuticals.

Full Technical Article