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 photographs such as which photographs 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, but instead of clicking on images in boxes or typing in scrambled letters you are instructed to press Windows +R and then press Ctrl + V and Press Enter.  However if you do so, you will have instructed your computer to open a hidden Run window on your computer and download malware without doing anything further.  This malware will steal your passwords and other sensitive data from your computer and lead to identity theft.

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.

A key way to distinguish a real CAPTCHA test from a fake one is that a real CAPTCHA test will never ask you to open a command window or ask you to use keyboard shortcuts such as Windows+R.

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