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March 17, 2010

What is Captcha and How Can it Protect My Website?

Website security is composed of many factors, and each factor is just as important as the next. A single vulnerability in the security of your website could lead to a massive lapse that results in data loss and possibly even fraud. Many people overlook one of the most common security threats, and that is spam. Although spam does not seem like a security threat at first glance, when you realize the detrimental effects spam is capable of causing, you soon realize it is a serious issue that needs to be addressed with any website.

How is Spam Dangerous?

Spam is a security threat because it compromises the integrity and validity of your website. Your site gains success due to authenticity and quality content. If you;re site is flooded with spam comments, then the of the quality content you worked to produce can instantly become littered with content that takes away from the overall quality of your website. This ultimately results in loss of traffic and even a decrease in your search engine ranking. In fact, many people have been de-indexed from the search engines due to a high amount of spam on their website. Most spammers place comments on your web pages that link to their website, in efforts to get quick backlinks with very little work. Instead of doing this manually they use programs called bots to do the commenting for them. However there is a way to stop these bots from commenting on your site, using Captcha.

What is Captcha?

Captcha is an image verification module that is used to verify whether or not someone is a real person. If you have signed up for an email address before, then you have probably seen a Captcha box before. It is a strange looking image with oddly shaped characters in it, also it is very difficult for a program to decipher the image content. The Captcha box prompts the user  to enter in the information sen in the image to verify that the user is indeed a genuine human being.

What Other Ways Can Captcha Protect My Site?

Another way that Captcha is useful in protecting your site from spammers is that it protects your site from false user registration. Instead of just preventing spam comments and fraudulent user registration, Captcha can also be used to prevent bots from doing anything else on your website that you would only want genuine human beings doing, such as contacting you via email using your sites contact form. Many times your competitors or hackers will bombard your business inbox with spam using the contact  form on your website which is directly linked to your business email. If you don't use Captcha to protect your contact form from spammers, then you could find yourself trying to delete a sea of spam from your inbox. The main reason why this method works so well to spam people, is because the spam folder in the business email is not going to recognize the emails as spam, since the emails are coming from the contact form of your own website. For this reason it is absolutely imperative to use Captcha with your website in every way possible.

Tags: security threats,  fraud,  Captcha,  website security,  verification module,  spammers,  spam,  security vulnerability