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Protect your email Using TinyMail

TinyMail is a simple service with one goal, to protect your email address from spammers. We hand out our emails every day. We post it in forums, social networking sites, chat clients and other internet forms that ask for email. The purpose of handing out our emails on public pages is for other people to contact us and not for some spam bot to harvest it and send us a load of spam mails.

One of the solutions is to create another email for public use and not the personal one that you use with real people. Another solution is to mask your email using TinyMail. What it does is hides you original email and creates a link/page for you with captcha security to ensure that the one accessing your email is a real person and not some email harvesting bot. Just enter your email address and it will create an html link, forum link and a simple URL for you. The receiving end can only view the email after he/she answers the captcha keywords correctly. This will verify that a real person is picking up your email address.

This is a great way of protecting your email. It’s not very efficient on the receiving end because of the time it takes to unlock the hidden email. If you are highly concerned with protecting your email address from spam, then you might find TinyMail of great use. If the recipient of the person is interested enough in contacting you, then the few seconds it takes to unlock your email should be no problem at all.

Tags: captcha, email, protect, tinymail

Yahoo CAPTCHA Cracked By Russians

CAPTCHA (Completely Automated Turing Test To Tell Computers and Humans Apart), is a program that protects websites against bots by generating and grading tests that humans can pass but current computer programs cannot. For example, humans can read distorted text as the one shown below, but current computer programs can’t:

The Yahoo! CAPTCHA being the most difficult CAPTCHA to crack found itself vulnerable to a team of Russian hackers who found a way to read the CAPTCHA with 35% accuracy. Yahoo! Captcha utilizes bended alpha numeric characters and other features that one might expect from a strong CAPTCHA, but is still recognizable by humans.

This is what the hackers said about Yahoo! CAPTCHA:

The CAPTCHA has a vulnerability we’ll discuss later. It’s not necessary to achieve high degree of accuracy when designing automated recognition software. The accuracy of 15% is enough when attacker is able to run 100.000 tries per day, taking into the consideration the price of not automated recognition – one cent per one CAPTCHA.

This is an alarming issue for everybody. This kind of vulnerability will allow more emails to be registered automatically and can be used for phishing spam and fraud. This will clearly have a great negative impact on the online community and businesses. They must find new ways to improve CAPTCHA. Maybe we’ll be seeing some form of evolution in CAPTCHA, what are those billion dollar companies paying their programmers and developers for anyway. If this is not resolved quickly, we can expect automated online businesses, blogs, and any site that utilizes CAPTCHA to take extra effort in making sure that they are safe from spam by checking their comments and transactions manually.

Source: geeksaresexy

Tags: captcha, flaw, security, spam, Yahoo