Google Just Made CAPTCHA Checks A Whole Lot Less Irritating

<p><strong>Google </strong>had a lofty goal for version 3 of the technology it acquired from<strong> Carnegie Mellon</strong> almost a decade ago. The company wanted to make the <strong>reCAPTCHA </strong>process "frictionless." No more images to click. No more scribblings to decode. Not even a box to check.</p> <p>The new <strong>reCAPTCHA </strong>is now here, and <strong>Google </strong>has accomplished its goal. The test is completely invisible to users.</p> <p>When you land on a website that's using <strong>reCAPTCHA v3 </strong>you won't even know your humanity is being verified. Everything happens silently in the background. Only the site your visiting and Google's <strong>reCAPTCHA </strong>servers are aware that anything is going on.</p> <p>How can <strong>Google </strong>determine that you're a person and not a bot without making you do anything?</p> <p>Because you've already done plenty in your browser. All <strong>Google </strong>has to do is analyze what you've already done.</p> <p>Instead of inserting Google's <strong>reCAPTCHA </strong>code on a single page, webmasters are advised to add it to several pages. That allows Google to more accurately track a visitor's behavior -- and ultimately make the call whether someone is an ordinary user or an attacker looking to compromise the site.</p> <p>Google calls this background testing "adaptive risk analysis." Each site visitor is given a test score and it's up to the site to decide what happens after that. Low scores (suspicious users) can be forced to take additional tests. Those might include old-school <strong>reCAPTCHA </strong>challenges or entering a verification code sent via text message.</p> <p>Users who receive higher scores are believed to be legit and can go about their business without interruption.</p> <p>As the ThreatPost blog points out, <strong>reCAPTCHA v3</strong> will make it much harder for scripts and bots to fool and abuse websites. A single test on a single page might be easy enough to defeat, but beating multiple tests across a website will prove much, much harder.</p> <p><strong>reCAPTCHA v3</strong> could lead to a significant drop in comment spam, and that's good news for all of us.</p>