We are all familiar with CAPTCHA tests which appear on many websites that we use and are intended to confirm that you are not a robot, but a real person.  CAPTCHA is an acronym for “completely automated public Turing Test to tell computers and humans apart.”  The name Turing refers to early British computer scientist Alan Turing.  CAPTCHA tests generally take the form of having to recognize scrambled letters or numbers or to recognize patterns in a number of pictures such as which pictures have traffic lights.  People are familiar with CAPTCHA tests and although many people find them mildly annoying, people trust them and there is the problem.  Scammer are setting up legitimate appearing websites with fake CAPTCHA tests that require you to click on a box to solve a simple test, but when you follow the instructions, you end up downloading dangerous malware.

It should be noted that even “legitimate” CAPTCHA tests sometime are used by the websites to collect data from you such as your IP address and browser history without telling you that your information is being gathered  This information is then sold to companies looking to use that information.

TIPS

Trust me, you can’t trust anyone.  Particularly when going to unfamiliar websites you should be wary of CAPTCHA tests that appear there.  Additionally, you should make sure that you have good security software on all of your electronic devices that you update whenever security patches are issued to protect you from known malware threats.

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