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Is your CAPTCHA keeping humans out?

• CAPTCHAs are important for preventing DDoS attacks, as they prevent botnets from accessing processor-intensive parts of websites such as login forms. But they can give false positives, where CAPTCHAs filter out humans, which is particularly bad in the COVID-19 era where it is essential to be able to access services virtually. The article goes on to describe the history of CAPTCHA development:
• reCAPTCHA is a CAPTCHA service company that was acquired by Google; it accounts for around 93% of all CAPTCHAs on the web.
• Early versions of CAPTCHA software had users deciphering distorted words and numbers, and typing these into a box. These should no longer be used today, as they are entirely visual and therefore inaccessible to users with visual impairments.
• reCAPTCHA version 2, released in 2014, analyses the way the cursor moves across the screen to determine whether the motion is likely to be human. If it isn’t, it presents the user with an audio or visual challenge, such as clicking images which contain fire hydrants.
• reCAPTCHA version 3 was released in 2018; it eliminates user challenges altogether and returns a “probability score” indicating the likelihood the user is human. It is up to the developers to take extra steps if the score is low, e.g. authenticate the user through an email link.
• The article closes by asking developers not to roll out their own CAPTCHA solutions, which are likely to be less accessible than the industry standards.

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