Google’s latest version of their reCAPTCHA tool, version 3, transparently analyzes user behavior in the browser instead of requiring specific human input. Over time, CAPTCHAs have come to include different types of puzzles, including identifying specific objects within a complex image, transcribing short audio files, or solving logical puzzles, such as turning an image right-side up. In the beginning, these puzzles were mostly visual, and usually required users to parse distorted text and type it in. 2 CAPTCHAs weed out bots by presenting puzzles within the browser’s response that ostensibly only humans can solve.

1 This component is designed to identify and block bots that attackers use to automate and scale up attacks such as credential abuse, web scraping, or, in the case of tools like sneaker bots, to quickly buy up limited supplies of commodities like fashionable sneakers.

Few technologies better exemplify this arms race than the web element known as CAPTCHA. Information security often takes the form of an arms race, as attackers develop novel ways to use or abuse services on the web to their own benefit, and defenders scramble to adapt to and block these new techniques.

Captcha solving for sneaker bot