From USA Today (Byron Acohido)
It’s become the new front in cybercrime: scams and identity-theft programs that attack e-mail accounts and users of social-networking sites such as Facebook and MySpace.
To carry out many of these automated attacks, cybercriminals first must overcome “captchas,” the distorted letters and characters that users of an e-mail or social-networking account are required to type to complete certain online forms. For years, captchas have helped to stop or bog down automated programs aimed at creating, among other things, e-mail accounts that promote scams such as fake computer virus protection and bogus accounts on social websites that can be used to collect personal information on legitimate users.
