We can say, without any shadow of a doubt, that you have already come across Captchas at some point in your internet activities.
In fact, we can go further: you deal with Captchas frequently, even though sometimes this is not even communicated to you directly.
But do you know what a Captcha is ? How was this technology created and why has it become so ubiquitous today?
Discover the answers to these questions, and many more, in this article.
What does Captcha mean?
The word Captcha is actually an acronym. In English, it means “Completely Automated Public Turing test to tell Computers and Humans Apart”, which translates to “Completely Automated Public Turing Test to Tell Computers and Humans Apart”.
In other words, it is a tool that aims to identify whether the person visiting a given a major shift from glitz is a human or a bot . If the test proves that the visitor is human, entry is allowed.
If, on the other hand, the test identifies that the request comes from a robot, access to the website is immediately blocked.
One important point: it is false to say that all bot use is malicious. The truth is quite different.
Automated data collection, performed by bots called web crawlers , is one such legitimate use. Data collection is an important part of the global big data market , which is expected to reach a value of $70 billion by the end of 2022.
With this information in mind, Captcha is there to protect the information and sometimes reduce the need for greater computing resources to maintain servers, since automated traffic will be reduced.
What threats can Captcha combat?
As we explained above, Captcha is online business for everyone? – interview with kasia zubrzycka-sarna on radio plus to prevent the use of bots on websites, even if these uses are legitimate and supported by law.
Some of the most common threats that Captcha combats are:
- Bulk online buying : This is the act of using bots to buy products and tickets in large. Quantities to create shortages and then resell them at high prices.
- Fake reviews : You know those reviews on websites or product pages that don’t look like they were written by humans? That’s exactly what this is.
- Spam : Spam emails, the type of advertising that nobody likes, have difficulty using Captchas .
- Account hijacking : This is when hackers take possession of accounts, whether email, social media or any other, and prevent the real owner from recovering them.
How is a Captcha test activated?
It is very common nowadays for websites to have systems in place. To determine whether the origin of a visit is from a human or a bot .
If these systems identify any suspicious mobile lead on the part of the user. A Captcha test is immediately to resolve the suspicion. This entire process is sometimes completely invisible to the user, as we will see later.
Most common types
There is no single type of Captcha . In fact, there are so many that we have selected the most commonly used ones and how each one works.
- reCAPTCHA : This is probably the most widely used type of Captcha today. It is maintained by Google and has different versions that are covered in detail later.