Security researches have come up with an automated attack that can reportedly beat the CAPTCHA system used by Google and Facebook.
On Google's reCAPTCHA system, which is used by millions of websites, the researchers recorded a 70.78 percent success rate over 2,235 CAPTCHAs with an average solving time of just 19.2 seconds.
The researchers fared even better on Facebook's system with a success rate of 83.5 percent on over 200 CAPTCHAs.
For attackers, the whole automated system would cost only $110 a day, per IP address, and would allow them to crack around 63,000 CAPTCHAs in 24 hours from one IP address without being detected and getting banned.
Suphannee Sivakorn, Jason Polakis, and Angelos D. Keromytis are the three experts behind this research. Their paper called I Am Robot: (Deep) Learning to Break Semantic Image CAPTCHAs, is available Columbia University's Department of Computer Science website.