The de-facto bot prevention technique sprawls everywhere on the web but I am surprised how people overestimate the difficulty of breaking a captcha. Here are some of them which I encountered.

It won’t take rocket science to convert them to text. In fact, the only two free tools needed for this purpose are: tesseract and Imagemagick.

1

convert captcha.jpg -threshold 5% a.jpg

Adjust the threshold value to get a binary image with no noise.

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tesseract -l eng a.jpg text

This will create a “text.txt” file with the captcha text in it.

I ran a test on effectiveness of these commands and the success rate was nearly 9 / 10, clearly implying how weak or better say, made-from-scratch captcha implementations are as good as having none at all.