Online Video Taking Away Media Spend from Other Formats

Wednesday, May 25, 2011

According to research from online video ad network Brightroll, the effectiveness of online video advertising is making advertisers shift their media spend. Not surprisingly, targeting capabilities and reach are what advertisers see as the biggest value of online video. We have just scratched the surface of what video advertising can offer. As the industry improves its targeting and data collection...

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Why Security Should Matter to Marketers

Wednesday, May 25, 2011

David Koretz, CEO of Adventive, wrote an article earlier this month addressing how security should not be an after-thought for marketers. He brought up the Sony Playstation data leak that had almost 100 Million users have their private data, including credit card info, stolen. David's main point is that this was totally preventable.In our business dealings we have seen first hand how major compani...

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Increase Your Video Ad Revenue Through Relevance

Thursday, May 12, 2011

I recently read an article on ReelSEO about how relevant advertising can increase the money a web publisher can earn. It seems like common sense but many sites just run video ads without thinking about: • If the site is safe for the brand • If the site appeals to the customer the advertiser wants to reach?Though video advertising is growing on the web, we are still behind in offering advertisers...

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How much is your personal identity worth?

Wednesday, April 20, 2011

Tech security leader Symantec just released their annual Internet Security Report. One section I found very interesting was about the top 10 items for sale in the Internet underground. Basically these are the personal identity items being stolen from you and sold on the black market.Not surprisingly, credit card and bank info are numbers 1 and 2. However, seeing email accounts fetch $1-$18 was a s...

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Effectiveness of Video Advertising: VideoEgg Case Study

Wednesday, April 20, 2011

Both NuCaptcha and VideoEgg believe engagement is what truly drives brand metrics. Last December, leading research company, comScore, did a case study with VideoEgg to measure how effective VideoEgg’s AdFrames engagement product was. Two key takeaways from this study are:- On average, unaided and aided brand recall was 2x higher than a standard ad banner- Those who engaged with AdFrames were 6x mo...

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Ways to Use Video Advertising

Wednesday, April 20, 2011

Video advertising has shown to provide better brand recall, higher click through rates, and a better ROI for marketers. Its use is so effective, that I now expect every sales oriented site to have a video to showcase their product or service. At NuCaptcha we specialize in running video ads, but there are other ways you can use video as an advertising tool for your business:Demos: As mentioned abov...

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Security Trends for 2011 By Imperva

Tuesday, March 15, 2011

Last month we featured Symantec’s security predictions, but this month we feature Imperva’s. Here is the top 10 taken from their recently released whitepaper: • Convergence of Data Security and Privacy Regulation Worldwide • Cyber Security Becomes a Business Process • Hackers Feeling the Heat • Mobile Devices Compromise Data Security • Data Security Goes to the Clou...

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Closing the $50B Gap between Online and Offline Advertising

Tuesday, March 15, 2011

Yahoo!’s Chief Product Officer, Blake Irving, recently spoke at the Internet Advertising Bureau’s Annual Leadership Meeting. It’s stated that a third of media consumption will be moved online; however, a third of media advertising is not online. Blake figures there is a $50 B gap between both ad mediums. He sees three catalysts that will help close this gap:1. Technology is on the cusp of antic...

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7 Trends for Online Video Advertising Engagement

Tuesday, March 15, 2011

As our NuCaptcha Engage product implies, we specialize in video advertising engagement. So it was very timely that eMarketer recently produced a very informative article on the 7 Trends of Video Advertising Engagement. The report will be pricey ($695) for most, so we have highlighted the 7 trends fo...

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NuCaptcha for Wordpress

Monday, March 07, 2011

The NuCaptcha WordPress plugin is a critical feature for active websites. The feedback from our customers is that even when using other advanced spam filtering techniques, they still receive dozens or hundreds of spam comments every day. In some cases it is a full time job to manage the combination of legitimate and illegitimate messages received. There are many Captcha plugins available for WordP...

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Internet Security Predictions for 2011, by Symantec

Tuesday, February 08, 2011

Each month our NuCaptcha staff of experts search the web for information that is valuable to our users and developers interested in knowing more about web fraud detection and the most recent ways to protect their customers websites. This month we have a great article by Symantec on Internet Security Predictions 2011Internet Security Predictions for 2011, by SymantecWe think the section about smart...

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How to protect your online customers from identity theft

Tuesday, February 08, 2011

Chief Research Analyst of IT Harvest, Richard Steinnon was the former Chief Marketing Officer for Fortinet. Fortinet is a leading provider of network security appliances. Recently Richard posted an article that outlined some guidelines for website developers and publishers in regards to how you can protect your customers from Identity theft. The very best way is to NOT store customer credit card i...

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What types of attacks does a Captcha protect?

Tuesday, February 08, 2011

Captcha technology has evolved since originally invented and coined by Luis von Ahn. What hasn’t changed is why they exist in the first place: to protect and secure websites from intrusive bots designed to exploit your sites or services. Now captchas are a first line of defense for identity theft, but there are two threats that require an extra protective measure: SQL injection and cross-site scri...

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What is the value of ads that run through Captchas?

Tuesday, February 08, 2011

Running ads through captchas is a relatively new tool for the advertising sector. Everyone understands that the user MUST view the ad to get through the captcha and that guaranteed viewed ad must be worth more than a banner ad or other regular video ad; but how much can a publisher expect to earn on these types of captcha ads? The entire captcha industry serv...

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NuCaptcha to attend RSA Conference

Tuesday, February 01, 2011

NuCaptcha's Chief Operating Officer, Ron Moravek, will be attending the RSA conference at the Mascone Center in San Francisco Feb 14-18th. The conference attendees include both providers of software security and enterprise companies looking to further secure their web presence. RSA i...

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Akamai State of the Internet Webinar- Focus on High Traffic Attacks

Thursday, January 27, 2011

Yesterday I attended the Akamai State of the Internet Webinar. The first 13 slides were full of broadband adoption rates along with other statistical information about high speed internet usage along with mobile information, etc. What I found most interesting was from slide 14 onward. The news ov...

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Facebook Captcha?

Wednesday, January 26, 2011

Facebook’s Social Captcha Nightmare Facebook announced today that they would be using their own social captchas to authenticate that humans are logging in. In situations where the platform security identifies a possible bot or hack instead of seeing a traditional captcha of words or characters, the user will see a picture of a friend that they will have to identify. ...

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Researcher Cracks Recaptcha

Friday, January 07, 2011

Homegrown algorithms for cheating Google's reCAPTCHA released earlier this month. A researcher earlier this month demonstrated how he solved Google's reCAPTCHA program even after recent improvements made to the anti-bot and anti-spam tool by the search engine giant.... "[ReCAPTCHA] has never been wholly secure. There are always ways to crack it," says Houck, whose algorithms have been available on...

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Does PING need captcha?

Monday, September 13, 2010

On September 1st Apple released a music focused social network called Ping.Surprisingly, it didn’t require any verification beyond an Apple ID to join or post. Not surprisingly, it immediately began to ooze spam.Apple has managed to clean the Ping system of this unwanted content, likely by identifying the offending accounts, then removing them and their spam. The notion behind using only an Apple...

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Captcha 101: Understanding the Basics

Monday, September 06, 2010

As the inaugural post of the NuCaptcha blog I thought I would start with describing, at a high level, the two primary types of Captchas.All Captchas are a form of challenge-response authentication. That is to say, you are asked a question, you respond, and if you’re correct, access is granted. You’re unlocking a password.What makes a Captcha different than a password is the type of question. Fo...

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ReCAPTCHA now vulnerable to computer cracking

Tuesday, August 31, 2010

... At DEFCON 18, a researcher presented an paper claiming that he had devised an algorithm that would solve ReCAPTCHAs 30% of the time. While that is only about a 1 in 3 success rate, when solving one ReCAPTCHA fails a website generally pops up another, so a bot using this algorithm would only need to keep trying until it eventually got one right.... Read More: http://www.teleread.com/chris-meado...

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Is Breaking CAPTCHA a Crime?

Saturday, July 31, 2010

Prosecutors in a New Jersey ticket scalping case are pushing the envelope on the federal computer hacking law, setting a precedent that could make it a felony to violate a website's terms of service and fool a CAPTCHA, according to electronic civil rights groups intervening in the case. Read More: http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2010/07/ticketmaster/

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Those Scrambled Word Tests For Stopping Spambots Are Tough For Humans Too

Wednesday, June 16, 2010

Those squiggled words at the bottom of sign-up pages and comment boxes--also known as CAPTCHAs, an acronym for Completely Automated Public Turing test to tell Computers and Humans Apart--are designed to be tough for mere software to decipher, weeding out spambots from humans. Trouble is, humans seem to have a surprisingly tough time cracking them, too.... The results don't speak well for humans' p...

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Lessons From Yelp's Ordeal: Retaining Customer Trust is Key

Friday, April 30, 2010

Here at ReadWriteStart, we've mentioned the importance of credibility as an entrepreneur when meeting with venture capitalists and potential investors, but it is also important to carry that credibility forward into your company as you interface with customers. Amid rumors that it was extorting businesses by offering to de-emphasize negative reviews in return for adverting purchases, social review...

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Twitter, Twitter Anywhere: CEO Announces New Feature

Thursday, March 18, 2010

At the South by Southwest Interactive conference today, Twitter CEO Evan Williams announced a new feature that will make it even easier for Twitter users to broadcast their tweets across the Web. The new platform, called @anywhere, integrates Twitter with other sites, so that users can send tweets and follow others directly from those sites. "The big thing that @anywhere does is reduce friction," ...

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Wiseguys Indicted in $25 Million Online Ticket Ring

Wednesday, March 03, 2010

A ring of ticket brokers has been indicted in connection to an elaborate hacking scheme that used bots and other fraudulent means to purchase more than 1 million tickets for concerts, sporting events and other events. The defendants made more than $25 million in profits from the resale of the tickets between 2002 and 2009. ... The perpetrators' bots monitored ticket websites and sprang into actio...

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Google reCAPTCHA cracked

Sunday, January 17, 2010

Despite denials from Google, a security researcher continues to assert that the Search King's reCAPTCHA system for protecting Web sites from spammers can be successfully exploited by Internet junk mail panderers. Researcher Jonathan Wilkins published a paper recently that included an analysis of reCAPTCHA's security. In automated attacks he conducted against the system, he reported he had an alarm...

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New Google CAPTCHAs now cracked

Thursday, December 17, 2009

Even the latest images in Google's reCAPTCHA can be cracked with sufficient reliability to allow protective services to be exploited. Last week, Google complained that claims to this effect only related to an old CAPTCHA method from 2008 that is no longer used. Now, Jonathan Wilkins, the author of the analysis report, has taken a closer look at the new captchas. The main difference is the lack of...

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Google's reCAPTCHA dented

Wednesday, December 02, 2009

Google has denied that the current version of its reCAPTCHA captcha service contains vulnerabilities which make it easier for spammers to guess displayed words using automated scripts. At the weekend, software developer Jonathan Wilkins published a document describing a procedure which can be used to increase the hit rate for automatic recognition of Google captchas to nearly 18 per cent. This wou...

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Machine Learning Attacks Against the Asirra CAPTCHA

Wednesday, December 31, 2008

The Asirra CAPTCHA [EDHS2007], proposed at ACM CCS 2007, relies on the problem of distinguishing images of cats and dogs (a task that humans are very good at). The security of Asirra is based on the presumed difficulty of classifying these images automatically. In this paper, we describe a classifier which is 82.7% accurate in telling apart the images of cats and dogs used in Asirra. This classifi...

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Gone in 60 seconds: Spambot cracks Live Hotmail CAPTCHA

Wednesday, April 30, 2008

Internet users are quite familiar with the Completely Automated Public Turing test to tell Computers and Humans Apart (CAPTCHA), a quick method that verifies whether or not the user trying to sign up is a person or a bot. A picture with swirled, mangled, or otherwise distorted characters is displayed and the user then types in the correct letters or numbers. Thus far, the system has worked well to...

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Gmail being throttled, blocked by some anti-spam vendors

Thursday, April 24, 2008

Have you had problems receiving e-mail from Gmail users recently? If so, you're one of thousands. Over the past month, major anti-spam vendors have had to apply scrutiny to Gmail in a way they haven't had to before, and the result is reduced delivery performance and sometimes outright blocking of Gmail. Some messaging hosts are being instructed to reject SMTP connections from Google. Ars Technica ...

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Gotcha, CAPTCHA! Gmail bot detector system cracked

Wednesday, February 13, 2008

The Gmail CAPTCHA has been cracked--albeit not easily--raising new concerns about spammers' ability to abuse Google's e-mail services. Websense Security Labs pointed out the security breach late last week, noting that spammers have a lot to gain by being able to use bots to automatically sign up for new accounts. ... But, while the CAPTCHA has worked well in the past, hackers are getting better at...

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Yahoo's CAPTCHA Broken -- Is a Spam Tsunami in the Offing?

Wednesday, January 16, 2008

The CAPTCHA security system that Yahoo, and many other email service providers adopt to prevent spam, may not be secure, according to Russian security researchers. The researchers claim to have found a way in which the security system can be compromised. This would result in a huge increase in spam coming from Yahoo! and other email accounts. Read More: http://www.astricon.net/topics/broadband-mob...

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