Sept 11:
India is
known as the source of skilled IT manpower. This manpower is not only used
for positive work in the IT field but also for "Outsourced Criminal
Activities". These activities are in the form of development of Phishing
Websites, Development of Pornographic Content etc. Recently, one more
activity appears to have been added on to this Outsourced Criminal
Activities. It is "Breaking of CAPTCHAs" supposed to be working at breaking
of CAPTCHAs at a meagre rate of US $ 2 to $5 per thousand.
(CAPTCHA stands for
"Completely Automated Public Turing test to tell Computers and Humans
Apart". It's mostly used to prevent automated registration or activity
where we would like humans to participate, but keep the excesses away.
These are images containing some code letters or numbers which the users
are asked to input to authenticate a transaction such as opening of an
e-mail account. The jumbling of image is done in such a manner that the
digits are not machine readable and only a human can read the same and
input it in the filed).
Experts feel that there are
countless number of franchises operated by several of India’s large data
processing companies offering "Home based working opportunities". There are
also software developers developing tools for making the work easy. The
articles refered to here in contain more details.
One
such service provider is
the
India based decaptcher.com,
It must be stated
that all the persons working for such projects are actually committing an
offence both under Indian laws as well as foreign laws. Companies engaged
in such services could easily be hauled up both under ITA 2000 as well as
IPC.
One Indian website which is
involved in such an activity is said to be
www.decaptcher.com. This is owned
by a Russian registrant but hosted in India.
Naavi
August 10, 2008
More information: ZDNET
Blog_1,
Blog_2
Decaptcher.com home page :
Whois record of decaptcher.com
