One of the leaders in beating Captchas is XRumer. XRumer is a spam tool that posts comments in forums or on blogs. The point of XRumer is to saturate forums and blogs with spammy links to “Site A” in order to increase the search engine rank of “Site A.” XRumer reportedly can even defeat the advanced Captchas used in Gmail and Hotmail (link here), and XRumer is only one of many advanced Captcha circumvention tools.

Unfortunately, there haven’t been any big strides forward taken by the Captcha industry and adopted by the mainstream to beef up security. One of the better Captcha concepts involves identifying rotated 3D images (here), but it too seems a long ways away from actual implementation.

If we are to buy valuable domains, and develop valuable sites, we need good security and it is too bad that the Captcha space leaves much to be desired.