Why Arkose Labs, Halcyon, Cyera, DataGrail, Vanta, and more are among Fast Company’s Most Innovative Companies in the security category.
Are you human?
It’s an increasingly important question, and one that’s getting harder to answer.
With its squiggly letters, the old CAPTCHA, the Completely Automated Public Turing Test To distinguish Computers from Humans, was developed in the early 2000s to stop malicious bots from creating new email accounts and was later used, somewhat ironically, to train machines to “read” garbled text. But given recent advancements in machine learning, the test and its various descendants can’t keep the bots at bay the way they used to.
This isn’t just a problem if you’re trying to buy concert tickets. Automatic CAPTCHA solving fuels a fusillade of online attacks, including phishing, password spraying, malware, and propaganda campaigns. Last December, Microsoft and a startup called Arkose Labs took down Storm-1152, a Vietnam-based operation that sold CAPTCHA-cracking services—powered by machine learning—to hacker groups like Octo Tempest that perpetrated ransomware attacks that eventually inflicted hundreds of millions of dollars in damages.
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