From The Register:
Spammers have broken captcha at Gmail with a 20% success record. With Gmail an unlikely domain to be blacklisted, spammers have gained a powerful, free and incredibly annoying new weapon with which to spread their penis enhancement and re-fi mortgage offers (one of which I did recently…not from a email, so save the hate mail….I’ll leave you in the dark as to which).
The spammers are believed to be the same ones that broke MSN’s Live captcha a few weeks ago.
Captcha (Completely Automated Public Turing test to tell Computers and Humans Apart) challenge-response systems, are used to prevent accounts being created until a user correctly identifies letters in an image, are designed to ensure requests are made by a human rather than an automated program. Websense reckons the latest Gmail Captcha hack is the most sophisticated it has seen to date.
