How accurate is reCAPTCHA? (2023)

How accurate is reCAPTCHA?

In 2016, an American computer science professor used off-the-shelf image recognition tools to solve Google's image CAPTCHAs with 70 percent accuracy.

reCAPTCHA is built for security. Armed with state of the art technology, it always stays at the forefront of spam and abuse fighting trends. reCAPTCHA is on guard for you, so you can rest easy.

ReCAPTCHA can tell you if you're experiencing high volumes of bot traffic. And we can't deny it's affordable. But on its own, it's not the most efficient or effective way to protect against bots. Dedicated bot management systems are more expensive than reCAPTCHA — but they also offer far better protection.

reCAPTCHA analyzes interactions with the website to detect if they are made by a human or some form of automated abuse. Sometimes, you may see a "failed reCAPTCHA check" error message while trying to create or amend your account. This means the website believes your actions may be those of a bot.

Visitors may even abandon the site as a result of the test. Some older reCAPTCHA tests can be fooled by bots.

If your answer is incorrect, you will be presented with another audio challenge. If your answer is correct, the audio challenge will close and the reCAPTCHA checkbox will become checked. ReCAPTCHA will also notify the screen reader of the successful verification.

CAPTCHA has been around since the late 1990s, and by now, advanced bots are often able to bypass simple text and image-based CAPTCHAs. As a result, more advanced CAPTCHA now leverage behavior recognition and fingerprinting to maintain website security.

CAPTCHA is the human validation test (usually the blurry squiglly letters that need to be deciphered) used by many sites to prevent spam. reCAPTCHA is a reversed CAPTCHA - the same test, used not only to prevent spam but to help in the book digitazion project.

We found perfect agreement by three humans only 31% of the time for audio captchas. captchas is lower than eBay's measured success rate: our data shows 93.0% accuracy, compared to eBay's measured success rate of 98.5% on 14,000,000 eBay site captchas. they account for almost 1% of all captchas delivered.

Why are CAPTCHAs getting so hard?

A captcha is a simple test that intends to distinguish between humans and computers. While the test itself is simple, there's a lot happening behind the scenes. The answers we give captchas end up being used to make AI smarter, thus ratcheting up the difficulty of future captcha tests.

CAPTCHA aren't accessible

Even users without impairments can have difficulty trying to decipher the cryptic text. Google acknowledge their reCaptcha text is so complicated that even humans only solve it 87% of the time. There are alternatives to inaccessible and difficult CAPTCHA.

Interpreting scores

reCAPTCHA Enterprise has 11 levels for scores with values ranging from 0.0 to 1.0. The score 1.0 indicates that the interaction poses low risk and is very likely legitimate, whereas 0.0 indicates that the interaction poses high risk and might be fraudulent.

reCAPTCHA works by taking any of the scanned words that cannot be recognised and presenting them to a human alongside a known word for interpretation. By typing the known word correctly, you identify yourself as a human and the reCAPTCHA system gains some confidence that you have correctly digitised the second.

Most websites use hCaptcha or reCAPTCHA. It takes the average person approximately 10 seconds to solve a typical CAPTCHA.

Simple CAPTCHAs can be bypassed using the Optical Character Recognition (OCR) technology that recognizes the text inside images, such as scanned documents and photographs. This technology converts images containing written text into machine-readable text data.

If a CAPTCHA fails to validate in your browser, clear the cache and redo the CAPTCHA. This should fix the issue.

Reasons why you might get multiple CAPTCHAs:

Your Internet Service Provider gave you an IP address that was previously used by hackers within the past few weeks, so our firewall is now mistaking you for a hacker. To fix this, reset your internet router, so you can get a new IP address.

Yes, CAPTCHA Can Be Hacked

CAPTCHA in all of its forms can be hacked or bypassed, and easily so. There are even courses one can take to learn how to create bots to bypass image-based and text-based CAPTCHA.

The manual-lookup copy protection in old games is challenge-response and not zero-knowledge. Another example would be CAPTCHA. Non-interactive zero-knowledge proofs are zero-knowledge and not challenge-response.

Why do I keep getting the I am not a robot?

If the I'm not a robot reCAPTCHA constantly spins after selecting the I'm not a robot reCAPTCHA box, you may be experiencing network or browser related issues. Please try either reloading the page or accessing the same page with a different browser such as Google Chrome or Mozilla Firefox.

Note: reCAPTCHA tokens expire after two minutes. If you're protecting an action with reCAPTCHA, make sure to call execute when the user takes the action rather than on page load.

1. Honeypot or time-based forms. The best alternative to a CAPTCHA tool is to completely remove the requirement for users to 'prove they are human'. Two examples we found are the honeypot or time-based alternatives.

Google interprets that your IP address / device sends multiple search requests at the same time (this creates a suspicious effect on the search engine). With CAPTCHA, Google makes sure that you are not a robot or a computer program that sends multiple requests for search or spam.

CAPTCHA prevents any spam or bots from entering data into fields on your site. This can include fake comments on posts, emails, fraudulent transactions, contact form entries and fake registration submissions.

Simple CAPTCHAs can be bypassed using the Optical Character Recognition (OCR) technology that recognizes the text inside images, such as scanned documents and photographs. This technology converts images containing written text into machine-readable text data.

Disadvantages of CAPTCHAs include: CAPTCHAs are not foolproof and can only limit spam. They can be time consuming or annoying to end users. To some people, CAPTCHAs may be challenging to read.

Some bots can get past the text CAPTCHAs on their own. Researchers have demonstrated ways to write a program that beats the image recognition CAPTCHAs as well. In addition, attackers can use click farms to beat the tests: thousands of low-paid workers solving CAPTCHAs on behalf of bots.

Google combines (or hashes) that key with the web address you're visiting, so you can't use a CAPTCHA from one website to bypass another. It further combines that with “fingerprints” from your browser, catching microscopic variations in your computer that a bot would struggle to replicate (such as CSS rules).

Popular methods to break CAPTCHA

Machine learning — Using computer vision, convolutional neural network, and python frameworks and libraries like Keras, tensorflow. We can train deep convolutional neural net models to find the letters and digits in the CAPTCHA image.

How attackers defeat CAPTCHAs?

Attacker programs script to ping 2Captcha using CAPTCHA ID (every 5 seconds until solved). 2Captcha then sends the solved CAPTCHA. If the solution is still being solved, the attacker receives a post from 2Captcha indicating “CAPTCHA_NOT_READY” and the program tries again 5 seconds later.