Toralv Dirro der Sicherheitsexperte von McAfee sagt:”Programme, um Captchas automatisch zu analysieren, gibt es seit etwa eineinhalb Jahren”

Toralv Dirro security expert from McAfee says: “Programs which automatically break captchas exist since about one and a half years”

Ok mr smart mouth should get his facts straight and google for OCR Optical Character Recognition is much older, which is the base of all the captcha breaking algorythms.

While captchas may be a new thing, the tools used to break these images existed already ages ago. For example GOCR a popular tool on the Linux platform for captcha breaking, existed before captchas where even invented. In fact the whole OCR stuff dates back to as far as 1929 as you can read here:

The History of Optical Character Recognition

Tauschek’s machine was a mechanical device that used templates. A photodetector was placed so that when the template and the character to be recognised were lined up for an exact match and a light was directed towards them, no light would reach the photodetector.

In 1950, David H. Shepard, a cryptanalyst at the Armed Forces Security Agency in the United States, was asked by Frank Rowlett, who had broken the Japanese PURPLE diplomatic code, to work with Dr. Louis Tordella to recommend data automation procedures for the Agency. This included the problem of converting printed messages into machine language for computer processing. Shepard decided it must be possible to build a machine to do this, and, with the help of Harvey Cook, a friend, built “Gismo” in his attic during evenings and weekends. This was reported in the Washington Daily News on 27 April 1951 and in the New York Times on 26 December 1953 after his U.S. Patent Number 2,663,758 was issued. Shepard then founded Intelligent Machines Research Corporation (IMR), which went on to deliver the world’s first several OCR systems used in commercial operation. While both Gismo and the later IMR systems used image analysis, as opposed to character matching, and could accept some font variation, Gismo was limited to reasonably close vertical registration, whereas the following commercial IMR scanners analyzed characters anywhere in the scanned field, a practical necessity on real world documents.

Original article about xrumer and the stupid mcafee comment can be found here (in german):http://www.virenschutz.info/beitrag-neu-Hacker-Software-XRumer-5-2556.html