Stop using CAPTCHA. Move to the right platform!

CAPTCHAs are annoying and ineffective

CAPTCHA (Completely Automated Public Turing test to tell Computers and Humans Apart) was invented in 1997, to differentiate between human traffic and bot traffic on a website. Over the years, bots became smarter and so did the CAPTCHAs. But the problem grew smarter than the solution. With every release of a new CAPTCHA system, hackers and scrapers found methods to solve CAPTCHAs or completely bypass them. Here is a simple guide on how to bypass something as widely used as Google reCAPTCHA - The No CAPTCHA Problem.

In fact, a parallel service industry started growing - Solving 1000 CAPTCHAs at $2. What remained of the CAPTCHA was it annoyed genuine users and let the bots pass through. Here is an excerpt from Josh Fraser’s article on Why You Should Never Use A CAPTCHA.

"My biggest beef with CAPTCHAs is that they are so freaking annoying for users. They add an incredible amount of friction to the process' friction that you probably can't afford. Sure, some CAPTCHA's are better than others, but none are great. I understand you want to protect your site from spam and abuse, but are you ready to lose potential users over it?"

The problem of identification of genuine traffic versus bot traffic remained unsolved, and a new problem began to arise - differentiating good bots versus bad bots.

In the last couple of years, the bot landscape has grown significantly, with over 50% of all web traffic being generated by bots. Many of these bots are good (like Google and Bing crawlers), but the larger share comes from ‘bad bots’ that hack, scrape and spam. Web Scraping has become a big industry in itself, and is being used extensively by businesses to steal content and data from their competitors. There are newer and smarter scraping tools being introduced into the market every day, adding to the share of bot traffic on the web.

Another crucial thing to note is the growing good bot industry, with businesses creating bots to do legitimate user actions like booking a travel, buying movie tickets or placing an order on an e-commerce store. With such good bots coming into the ecosystem, our good old CAPTCHAs will become more and more obsolete. The sheer size and sophistication of bot traffic needs much more complex algorithms to detect, differentiate and classify bots.

The Alternative

What we need is a robust platform, InfiSecure, that detects bots, understands the nature of the bots, classifies them as good and bad and blocks the bad bots. A platform that allows genuine users to go about their business without hassles of solving CAPTCHAs, and that protects the website with great accuracy at the same time.

With so many online businesses being setup every single day, the need for existing businesses to be protected from bots is immediate. Streamlining their traffic, allowing humans and good bots to pass and blocking bad bots with zero false positives is the need of the hour. Delaying such critical security measures can get all of their data, listings and content duplicated across the web on multiple competitor platforms across the globe. Such is the speed at which scraping is being used by upcoming businesses.

It is time for bigger businesses to move past CAPTCHAs and use a real bot protection platform. The purpose of building InfiSecure was to enable businesses to enjoy the benefits of the Internet without the fear of risk or compromise. Making it easier for businesses, InfiSecure gives a fully-functional 15-day trial to businesses to check their bot landscape and get protected.

In essence, CAPTCHAs are outdated. They end up annoying users. Move towards a better customer experience, stop throwing CAPTCHAs to genuine users. To protect from bots, use a bot protection platform. Be protected, have a smoother customer experience and enjoy your uniqueness on the web.