Eli5: who are these robots that reCAPTCHA protects us from?

Question

Who are they? How does it all work? What would happen if captchas weren’t there?

In: 18

Answer 1

The robots are programs designed to crawl sites for various reasons. They are easy to create by programmers. Not having CAPTCHA can result in:

– content theft
– credentials theft via brute force attack
– being scanned for vulnerabilities
– increased server load (a script instance can load a server as much as thousands of users)

In many cases CAPTCHA as devolved into a due diligence checklist item that insipid security auditors with no technical knowledge insist upon for no real reason.