Website administrators of high traffic businesses constantly seek new and novel ways to keep spambots away. Spambots are more active now than ever, with a large number of websites quickly catching onto pay-for-click strategies to increase marketing and market presence online. Spambots have increased in number over the years, and online marketing firms are taking on contracts for lesser money by employing the use of spambots in forums and website registrations to make page ranks.
CAPTCHA has long been hailed as a strong check in place for spambots, but with the introduction and use of OCR technology, spambots are quickly surpassing CAPTCHAs and their reinforcement, ReCAPTCHAs. OCR technology, or Optical Character Recognition technology, is the electronic conversion of handwritten text (exactly what CAPTCHA technology uses) into machine encoded text. Originally developed as a field of research in pattern recognition, artificial intelligence and computer vision, OCR enables spambots to bypass visual recognition based checks to create mass registrations and spam posts online.
If you own or develop websites and are struggling with bulk registrations, you’re going to need a stronger curtain to filter out the spammers. When you are managing websites, forum posts can only be regulated as much as the users who manage to register on the website in the first place. Once you enforce strong registration checks and rules in place, you’re going to be able to control the very source of spam posts! Spambots register online for several accounts so it’s impossible to track which one wrote the spam post, and as a web developer or manager, we can only imagine how nightmarish this might all seem. There are several new methods emerging in the online playspace that control spambots, like the use of honeypots, IP address blacklists, DNS blacklists and HTTP blacklists. But if you’re a serious business, keen on keeping it real, not just in terms of services, but also in terms of user experience and extended value to your customer base, you may have to look beyond CAPTCHA styled protection services. Spambots are affecting not just forum based websites but also social networks, classifieds and online communities.
Telesign’s security and authentication solutions ( read more at www.telesign.com) are powerful yet simple, and protect some of the world’s biggest companies from online fraud and scam. Telesign solutions are created not just for access points (creating an account, accessing your account and password reset actions) but also for eCommerce functions, which prevent bulk registrations using the most widely used technology available to everyone at hand– their phones. Telesign telephone number identification is used to prevent bulk registrations and make sure that the person registering for a new account on your site is a real person. Embedding this verification step at the very beginning is the best kind of protection you can give your website or online business. And if you’re still worried about spammers using VOIP services to increase their chances of passing through a buffer system like Telesign, here’s how the technology works.
TeleSign’s patented technology in the form of PhoneID prevents registration of users using anonymous VOIP and prepaid mobile phones. PhoneID takes care of unwanted registration by allowing the business to identify phone numbers provided by a user (landline, mobile, VOIP, etc.). Using PhoneID, the type of phone numbers users can be restricted. Verification voice calls and SMS work in essentially the same way – when you want to verify a user, a temporary PIN code is sent to the user’s phone to authenticate them. The main difference between the technologies is obvious: SMS messages can only be delivered to mobile phones, while voice calls can be delivered to all phone types.
Both voice and SMS messages can be sent to any country in any language. Historically, when given the option, about 40 percent of users choose to receive their PIN code via SMS (with the other 60 percent electing to receive a voice call.
And don’t worry, Telesign handles phone numbers from all over the world. Voice calls can also be delivered in any language, which is a huge help. So even if your typical customer base is Estonian, Filipino or Catalan (there are several other languages covered by Telesign), you can be rest assured they’ll be getting calls that they’ll understand. Telesign is a great way to ensure business online remains quality-oriented. Take a sample run through their services to find out more for yourself.