Scams Use Striptease to Break Web Traps

You know those wavy letters that you have to try to decipher in order to join some chatrooms or register for anything? Apparently some hackers are trying to figure a way to enter the correct combination mechanically but still look human and they need to aquire a whole lot of realistic input in order to do so.

So how do you get humans to voluntarily enter inane codes over and over? Put up a picture of a scantily clad woman and have them enter the right code for each article of clothing that comes off. The best part is, she never fully undresses but starts over and people play the game again, because afterall most of us have no clue whether that letter is a p q or g and we just end up guessing anyways, so why not assume we f'ed up.

The whole article is here http://news.wired.com/dynamic/stories/T/TECHBIT_STRIPTEASE_SCAM?SITE=WIRE&SECTION=HOME&TEMPLATE=DEFAULT&CTIME=2007-11-01-06-31-55

my favorite line is

Paul Ferguson, network architect at Trend Micro, speculated that spammers might be using the results to write a program to automatically bypass CAPTCHA systems.

"I have to hand it to them," Ferguson said, laughing. "The social engineering aspect here is pretty clever."