Search engine giant Google, in a bid to improve user-experience on the internet, has reportedly killed the web security tool Captcha and introduced a much-enhanced anti-bot feature reCAPTCHA.
Google has been testing it under the program — No CAPTCHA reCAPTCHA — for more than a year. Now, the company has officially introduced the reCAPTCHA with Artificial Intelligence (AI) with machine learning capability and which also performs advanced risk analysis in real-time.
Previously, users had to go through the Captcha security process, and asked to spell out tricky characters or identify places/road signs in a box, which many found very irksome and time-consuming.
Google then introduced beta-version of reCAPTCHA, where users were just asked to tick the checkbox with a question — "I'm not a robot". Even this was found be a nuisance.
Now, this feature has also been removed.
Google has made reCAPTCHA fully invisible. It is said to work silently in the background, keenly monitoring the activities on the internet and with AI, it can detect subtle signs, such as time taken to fill a particular form, or press submit button.
It will match these patterns with users' previous interaction on the internet and conclude whether the action performed was by a person or a bot.
Some of the security checks performed during testing on bots have revealed that a bot takes very less time to fill a form and there will be no movement of mouse on the screen. There are many other signs, which the new reCAPTCHA system is equipped to differentiate a bot from a human and if it finds the action suspicious, it can take independent decision like asking the user to undergo more tests and if not still satified, it neutralizes the bot attack.
Google's reCAPTCHA is a free service; interested companies can subscribe it on the official site.
