“Click the raccoon’s bow tie.” The bot tests are getting harder

Bots are special programs capable of communicating with the user as equals. They are misused on the Internet to create fake profiles, which can subsequently spread misinformation or malicious codes if they manage to log in to the page in question.

Their latest generation is so advanced that they easily overcome simple registration protections. This is precisely why web developers and security defenders had to react, which is increasingly being noticed by ordinary users.

The Internet will be flooded by an army of bots, anyone will be able to make them

Software

Scott Nover was trying to log into a certain website from his laptop when he found himself staring at a bizarre portrait of a forest creature in a jacket and vest with flowers and watermelon slices flying around. “Please click the raccoon’s bow tie,” was the instruction.

Although it might seem like it, it wasn’t a dream. Nover has just entered the strange new world of CAPTCHAs – those pesky computer quizzes devised by web security experts to distinguish humans from malicious internet bots, The Wall Street Journal wrote.

For years, people who wanted to shop online or connect to social media accounts could find themselves having to perform annoying but mostly simple enough tasks — unscramble words written in crooked letters, click pictures of a bus, or add up numbers. Now these tasks are getting weirder and require a few notches more brain power:

“Select two objects that have the same shape.”
“Match the number of stones to the numbers on the left.”
“Click on a creature that cannot live underwater.”
“Please click on the red object in front of the object that appears only once.”

“I was trying to log in and there was this crazy looking fruit, it looked like a bowl that you put on the table, but it grew from a tree,” Mustafa Al-Hassani, a 38-year-old game developer from Houston, described his experience with the new CAPTCHA. He was supposed to click on every picture containing an apple to enter. “It looked realistic, but at the same time very strange – it made my brain hurt,” he added.

What is CAPTCHA?

CAPTCHA is an abbreviation of the English term “Completely Automated Public Turing test to tell Computers and Humans Apart”. It was developed at the turn of the millennium as a way to prevent bots from disrupting websites and their databases while pretending to be regular users. Requiring humans to prove they are not robots, this test presents tasks that only humans can solve.

Companies used them to protect against bot attacks that can disrupt their websites and compromise users’ security. Bots aim to mimic human behavior, but faster – meaning, for example, that Taylor Swift concert tickets you’ve been waiting to buy could be snapped up by a tech-savvy tout in less than a second.

Earlier CAPTCHA tests asked users to enter words with garbled letters that automated programs couldn’t decipher. People soon got used to looking for fire hydrants and bridges and got upset when they failed simple tests.

Has anyone had that moment lately where you’ve failed the ‘I’m not a robot’ test so many times that you’ve stopped and thought… Maybe I’m a robot?

Frustration from them seeped into social networks, specialized sites, popular music and jokes. “Is it just me, or have the ‘I’m not a robot’ tests gotten harder?” asked British comedian Jack Whitehall in his latest Netflix special, before recounting how they once sent him into an existential crisis.

“Has anyone had that moment lately where you’ve failed the ‘I’m not a robot’ test so many times that you’ve stopped and thought… Maybe I’m a robot?” he said. “I wasn’t able to recognize ten traffic lights in a row. I’m either a robot or a cyclist!” he added.

The companies and cybersecurity experts who come up with these tests do what they can to stay one step ahead of the bad guys trying to crack them.

And as technology improves to automatically solve basic tests—like identifying motorcycles and reading garbled text—a new era of logic-based CAPTCHA tests is coming. And this shift explains why bot tests have become more annoying and confusing.

“Click the Cow’s Snout”

Simply identifying things is no longer enough for users. They have to identify them, and then do something with that information – move a puzzle piece, rotate an object, find the outline of a number hidden in a room. All this is compounded by the fact that the new tests contain images and objects generated by artificial intelligence that are difficult for robots to identify. However, problems also occur for people who simply want to log in.

“And over time, things will get even weirder because people will have to do things that are nonsensical,” said Kevin Gosschalk, founder and CEO of Arkose Labs, which develops the tests.

“Otherwise, large multimodal systems will be able to crack them,” Gosschalk added, adding that every CAPTCHA test will one day be able to be solved by a robot. “The idea is not to design something that machines can’t do, but to invent something that would be really, really expensive if the developers were trying to learn the software.”

And as for people, some are quite charmed by the new style of ‘I’m not a robot’ tests that are popping up on the internet. Marketing manager Alyssa DeHayes had to click on a cow’s snout a while back. “It was pretty cute!” she said.

And Scott Nover agrees. “The traditional ones have frustrated me for so long that I’m glad to see something new. I’d definitely rather do this than look for traffic lights,” he added.