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Breaking Rapidshare’s Annoying Captcha the Easy Way

Like many others, I got stuck in front of Rapidshare’s captcha. After more than five attempts at reading different letters with kittens and other critters hidden behind them, I was thinking of giving up. Especially because each time I failed I had to wait a half a minute again. However, in one instance I went *back* via my browser, and tried solving the same captcha again. Turns out this works, and I got the file.

I know I could probably have solved it in a smarter fashion, but it wasn’t worth the effort.

My lesson:

When someone writes crappy software, their software is probably crappy in more than one way.

This is not the first time I’ve seen this happen.

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This entry was posted on Thursday, April 24th, 2008 at 1:54 pm and is filed under Miscellaneous, Programming Philosophy, Security, web-design. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

One Response to “Breaking Rapidshare’s Annoying Captcha the Easy Way”

  1. Yoni Says:
    May 2nd, 2008 at 5:15 am

    Does this mean one can write a bot that tries all 6choose4 combinations for a single captcha?

    1. Interpret all 6 characters with certainty by using a pretty good OCR algorithm.
    2. Try all 15 possibilities, simulating a “back button press” after each one.

    Alternatively:

    1. Interpret all 6 characters with certainty by using a pretty good OCR algorithm.
    2. Try a random possibility.
    3. Repeat ~15 times until success.

    If either is possible, this extra kitten layer does not offer that much more security…

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