UPDATED 07:04 EDT / AUGUST 11 2011

How Can Big Data make Captcha Human Friendly?

Who would’ve thought that the cloud could help Captcha become more human?  NuCaptcha has leveraged big data in a big way, creating the “human-friendly” Captcha campaign in an effort to gain new clients around its service.  What NuCaptcha offers is a platform for adding Captcha in your website, enhancing security and warding off botnets.  But this company feels the evolution of Captcha has gone the wrong way, making it more difficult for end users to complete.  NuCaptcha takes the end user perspective in improving verification processes that are designed for actual human use, instead of merely beating an aggressive algorithm.

Studying those malicious algorithms is what helps NuCaptcha design a human-friendly approach, following patterns of attacks and Captcha circumventions that automated processes come up with.  The result is a simplified interface for Captcha, designed to retain users on a site and help them through security as fast and painlessly as possible.  But NuCaptcha is hoping to catch the eye of its customers as well, extending a series of customization options around this type of website security.  NuCaptcha has whittled requirements to as few as three legible letters, which an end user can complete in seconds.  If a website needs more than that, they can up the letter requirement to a higher number, with NuCaptcha scaling up its end-user usability accordingly.

NuCaptcha is also setting out an end-to-end solution, incorporating full custom options for size and color, stats and video-based templates, and even options to incorporate ads for additional site monetization.  Today’s launch expands NuCaptcha’s existing line of products, which start at free and work their way to the enterprise level, layering in more custom capabilities along the way.  This is all part of NuCaptcha’s plan to enable sites to make the Captcha process as integrated as possible, working seamlessly with site design and making things easy on the eye (and brain).

NuCaptcha’s been working on these updates for a while, drilling down on client needs and finding ways to incorporate the growing importance of business intelligence for its clients as well as its own product offerings.

“It’s not only about what threats are out there–some new area in China or a new algorithm, or the speed of attacks–we’re also going to look at what the humans are doing,” says Christopher Bailey, co-founder and CTO of NuCaptcha.  “We can measure very closely and see trends and botnet attacks.  And as we grow our clients, we can better recognize patterns and trends, and react accordingly.”

Sounds like a job for big data analysis.  NuCaptcha is basically monitoring every action in its network, with more websites contributing more data to its research.  And at the enterprise level, turning some of this information over to clients is an expectation, as security for their webistes is high.  NuCaptcha has a behavioral analysis system that’s extended to its enterprise product offering, integrating with their own security applications or running as its own security option.  From here, a company can get a score on attacks, recommendations on what type of Captcha combo to use, and other points of analysis.  And best of all, everything happens in real-time.

NuCaptcha’s at an interesting intersection of BI and security trends, both of which seek out big data analysis to predict the future and power better business decisions.  For security in particular, other companies like Lookout are scoring through mounds of data do determine patterns of attack, modifying their products in real-time in order to address the growing problem of malware and hacks that’s plagued 2011 in particular.  There’s so much we can learn from patterns in data, and those companies that are putting this data to use are the ones best prepared for the landscape of tomorrow.


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